Gravity Made Visible
Fabienne Verdier Meets Jackson Pollock

: Horn, Switzerland

american contemporary art GALLERY is pleased to present Gravity Made Visible: Fabienne Verdier Meets Jackson Pollock, the gallery’s first exhibition with Fabienne Verdier (b. 1962) and the first to place her paintings in the company of works on paper by Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). Curated by Corinna Thierolf, it proposes a dialogue of an unusual kind — one built not on influence but on a force that both painters let into the work: in her catalogue essay she develops gravity as a pictorial principle through which the work of both Pollock and Verdier can be read together. Her essay places this question at the heart of the exhibition and explores the very different ways in which the two artists engage with gravity.

Verdier works on canvases laid flat on the studio floor. During her years of training in China 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. As her tools grew, she discovered step by step that gravity could become formative — not an accident to be corrected but a collaborator.

The exhibition gathers fifteen paintings and four works on paper made between 2010 and 2025, and with them the instruments she devised to let that force into the work. 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 Vortex paintings of 2020, whose titles are taken from arias by Mozart, she works from a mobile platform above the center of the canvas, so that a single continuous gesture can turn about its own axis. In the Walking/Paintings, begun in 2013 and present here in canvases of 2019, 2022 and 2025, 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, in Thierolf’s description, the paint splays into concentric rings and sets into crater-shaped reliefs. The Rainbow Series of 2022 proceeds the other way about, building its light from glaze laid over glaze in a printing process; in some of the paintings she then adds a single white stroke with the brush. The four Breath Columns of 2014, oil pastels drawn during Edith Wiens’s voice classes at The Juilliard School, hold the same vertical axis in another register — the column of breath rising through a singing body.

Pollock enters this context not as a source but as a striking parallel: born fifty years before Verdier, he reached a comparable insight from another direction. Around 1947, without explicitly identifying it as a pictorial principle, he made gravity an ally, laying his canvas on the floor and directing paint onto it from above, accepting trails and drips that obey the hand only in part. The works on paper assembled here — a drawing in graphite and colored pencil of circa 1940, a sheet in ink, pencil and pink crayon of circa 1945, and monotypes of 1943, 1946, 1949 and 1950–51 — show that decision forming: four of them come before it, the monotypes of 1949 and 1950–51 after. Pollock never theorized the force he was using, but he was clear about where the method came from.

“Paints drip due to gravity — a law of nature that rarely yields to human artistic intent,” Thierolf writes in her catalogue essay. “Gravity is the vertical counterforce to the brush that has traditionally been manipulated more or less horizontally.” Pollock made that force visible and made it productive in the formation of the image; Verdier, by contrast, consciously integrates it into a system of vertical order that she came to know deeply and extensively during her years in China.

A third artist stands between them. In 1934 Mark Tobey traveled to China and Japan, studying calligraphy and spending some months in a Zen monastery near Kyoto; the following year, at Dartington Hall in England, he arrived at his “white writing” — a pale calligraphic line that would come to cover the whole surface of a picture, dissolving figure and ground into a single woven field. Pollock probably first saw those paintings at the Willard Gallery, New York, in 1944, three years before his own first poured canvases, and wrote admiringly of Tobey in letters of 1946.

Verdier holds the other end of that line, and her two paintings Energy Field, In Homage to Mark Tobey (2010) are the exhibition’s central bridge. She first saw Tobey’s work in Lausanne, at Galerie Alice Pauli, where her paintings were shown from 2005 to 2017 and where she met the Zurich collector Hubert Looser. In 2006 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. Her paintings have hung with the Looser Collection at the Kunsthaus Zürich since 2021.

The selection was made by the artist and Ghislain Baizeau together with the curator and the gallery, and first seen in her studio in the Vexin.

In 1993 american contemporary art GALLERY became the first gallery in Germany to exhibit Jackson Pollock, and it has worked with the Pollock family collection ever since. Thirty-three years later that history opens onto the gallery’s lakefront space in Horn, where terraces above Lake Constance hold painting, water and light in a single conversation — and onto Fabienne Verdier, the newest artist in the gallery’s program.

A fully illustrated catalogue with a new essay by Corinna Thierolf is published by the gallery on the occasion of the exhibition.