Fabienne Verdier b. 1962

Fabienne Verdier (b. 1962, Paris) trained for close to a decade in China. There she studied and practiced calligraphic traditions in which the vertical tip of the brush meets a horizontal support, and in which the vertical axis expresses the union of Heaven and Earth. Returning to France, she developed in several steps the pendulum brushes and gravitational tools with which she paints on canvases laid on the studio floor.

Her pendulum brushes — horsehair, some almost as tall as she is, suspended from rails in the studio ceiling on counterweights and steered by handlebars fixed to the shaft — descend vertically onto canvas laid flat on the floor. In the Walking/Paintings, begun in 2013, Verdier dematerializes the brush, allowing the paint to fall directly onto the canvas as she moves: the height of the release, the speed of her step and the quantity let out decide the trail, and at the point of impact the paint splays into concentric rings and sets into crater-shaped reliefs.

In 2006 the Zurich collector Hubert Looser invited her, as an artist shaped by two cultures, to paint in response to works in his collection — sculptures by John Chamberlain and Donald Judd, paintings by Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly. It was in order to meet American art at its own scale, so that her canvases could look those works in the eye, that she enlarged her brushes; the discovery of gravity followed from that enlargement. She consciously integrates that force into a system of vertical order that she came to know deeply and extensively during her years in China. Her paintings have hung with the Looser Collection at the Kunsthaus Zürich since 2021.

Her work is held by the Musée national d’Art moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus Zürich; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo; and The Juilliard School, New York, among others. Recent institutional exhibitions include Mute, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris (2025–26), and Talking Lines: Fabienne Verdier Meets Sigmar Polke, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2017). She lives and works in the Vexin, northwest of Paris.