Aurelie Nemours

Aurelie Nemours was committed to the path of abstraction from 1949, developing an abstract painting, built from pure colors and geometric shapes from the square, but without dogmatism or systematism. Her compositions are strictly arranged in the plane, based on the intersection of the horizontal and vertical.

Aurelie Nemours died on January 27, 2005 in Paris at the age of 94, a few months after the Beaubourg Center paid tribute to her by organizing a major retrospective of her work. She had dedicated her life to painting.

His painting generally contains few colors (sometimes it only uses black and white), but always plays on the intensity of the colored fields. The painting implements chords of colors which can evoke tones, sonorities, describe climates. Her work is characterized both by its rigor but also by a very strong sensitivity, even a great spirituality. For Aurelie Nemours, painting was "seeking the truth of the world". She had, she said, "the painting in the heart and in the head".
 
Aurelie Nemours is the great lady of concrete art, and she is not only in her native country, France. Her work, which the museums of Ludwigshafen, Bottrop and Ingolstadt presented in Germany in a large retrospective exhibition in 1995, enjoys the highest international recognition. It belongs to the prominent works of concrete art and is the European variant of important American developments such as Ad Reinhardt's "Colorfield painting" or "Minimal Art".
 
In her works of the 1940s and 1950s, free forms and diagonal structures elaborate open patterns of colored surfaces. The serial works grouped under the title "Rhythm of the millimeter", the "Angles" so rigorous, relate two or more colors. Also, the irregular formal elements of the series "Number and Chance", the radiant canvases of the "Quartets" and the monochrome "Columns" are all elements that constitute her work. Although Aurelie Nemours certainly does not work without a system, since she will use numerical orders in her structural works, her work is not that of an austere "systematizing" Colour field painting. Her formal appreciations proceed most often from an intuitive approach and aim at giving rhythm to the pictorial space. The artist uses only a few colors, but the complex mixtures she uses generate tones vibrant with life.
 
The works of Aurelie Nemours are meditation paintings which, through the extreme reduction of colors and forms, visualize the ideas or laws underlying appearances and trigger reflections on the globality and the future of the universe. Conscious of actualizing principles in the sense of abstraction, Aurelie Nemours has created an impressive body of work of great visual power and spirituality. In "Nemours", edited by R. W. Gassen and L. von Mengden, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Wienand Verlag, 1995.