James Coignard, French Pop Art Modernist Textured Painting Abstract With Stencilled Letters, c.1960s

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This is a mixed media abstract painting with string, plaster texture, stencilled letters in a bold typeface. Size includes frame.

… Read more This is a mixed media abstract painting with string, plaster texture, stencilled letters in a bold typeface. Size includes frame.

James Coignard was born in Tours, France in 1925. At the age of three he moved to Paris with his parents. As a child he had an insatiable appetite for drawing and painting. In 1948, at 23 years of age, he made up his mind to become an artist and enrolled at the Ecole des arts Décoratifs in Nice. He apprenticed under the well-known painter Marchand des Raux. The following year the two of them staged a joint exhibition at the Musa de L’ile de France in St. Jean Cap Ferrat. Around the same time Coignard came into contact with the great Henri Matisse and was influenced by his work but soon began to seek his own ways forward. Not long afterwards, Coignard discovered the modernist™ handling of color via the techniques of Georges Braque and Marc Chagall. In both his mixed media on canvas and his works on paper, James Coignard is known for his technical versatility and use of vibrant primary colors. Coignard achieves a deep, heavy texture which is distinctive trait in his art.
With just a few strokes of his brush he conjures up an entire world. James Coignard extends the boundaries between concrete and abstract. He knows how to create chromatic melodies that shift in timbre from cobalt blue to blood red, from earthy tones to blocks of color as black as night. His paintings embrace everything from vast expanses of color to spaces enclosed. His pictures are an artistic epicenter where lines, letters and numbers mold with vigorous swashes of color. His paintings and graphic works are an artistic adventure, an aesthetic game in which the destructive and the momentous mingle freely with the spontaneous and the sensual.
His contact in the late 1950s with a number of Spanish artists and his special fascination for Catalan sculptures and frescoes proved decisive for his artistic development. In the 1960’s he began to create sculptures in bronze and glass, which he has continued to produce parallel with his paintings and graphic work. In the late 1960s Coignard produced his first etchings in the gravure au carborundum technique. The carborundum process of printmaking was developed by Henri Goetz in the 1960’s. It was Goetz himself that taught Coignard and other artists the use of carborundum for printmaking.
Since his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1960, Coignard has exhibited in major galleries and museums throughout the world, and is well represented in both private and public collections that include the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, California. He is represented by the Paule Friedland & Alexandre Rivault Gallery in Paris and edited by the Pasnic print house in Paris. James Coignard’s principal modes of expression were oil on canvas and gravure au carborundum, but also in bronze and glass sculptures as well as in ceramics. His work has been shown on more than 400 exhibitions, primarily in Central Europe and Scandinavia, but also in Canada and the USA. His first Swedish exhibition was at Malmö Museum in 1956. The early 1970s saw the start of a long-term liaison with Galleri Östermalm in Stockholm, owned by Editions Sonet. They came to represent him in Scandinavia and edited several volumes of his graphic works. See less