Exhibition catalogue, 2026
Gravity Made Visible
Fabienne Verdier Meets Jackson Pollock
For centuries the brushstroke was a means to portray people, landscapes, objects, and events in paintings. Modern art soon fundamentally changed that situation. Color, line, plane, and form increasingly became the focus for painters.
In the sequence of events outlined here the brushstroke breaks free of its subservience. It becomes a motif in its own right and the point of departure for paintings that owe their form and appearance not only to the artist’s will but also to the impact and nature of gravity, materials, and movement.
Section I
In 1965 Roy Lichtenstein produced a series of works in which he elevated the elemental means of expression in painting—the brushstroke—to the sole motif (fig. 1) in what was a keenly ironic yet precise reflection on the history of painting. With his Brushstroke paintings Lichtenstein both positioned himself in one of the main trajectories of modern art and pointed to the latter’s ossification in clichés.
He accomplished this volte-face by engineering a radical transformation: Whereas the Abstract Expressionists had fostered the notion that an artist was, as it were, personally present in a painting by dint of its brushstrokes (fig. 2)—to the extent that the artist’s individual touch became the defining feature of the work—Lichtenstein chose to create paintings with an almost industrial finish. His extremely smooth paint surfaces, precisely defined outlines, and meticulously rendered Ben-Day dots in the background amount to the exact opposite of what they are referencing. The hand-painted brushstroke—a movement that involves the whole body—is usurped by its own poster image. The king is dead, long live the king!
But what happens when the paint application is no longer primarily an expression of the artist’s subjective handwriting and instead obeys the laws of gravity, materials, and movement?
Section II
Despite his innovative concept of what form can be in painting, Lichtenstein continued to pay allegiance to the classical notion of painting as an upright composition that was often executed at an easel. Painters stand facing their work and keep careful control of their actions and choices, guiding the paintbrush horizontally across the canvas. However, in the twentieth century—as Lichtenstein aptly demonstrates in his work—drips of paint may remain visible in a painting, bearing witness to its authenticity, or land on the floor as residues.
Section III
Paints drip due to gravity—a law of nature that rarely yields to human artistic intent. Gravity is the vertical counterforce to the brush that has traditionally been manipulated more or less horizontally.
Section IV
Without explicitly saying so, in or around 1947 Jackson Pollock started to treat gravity as an ally in his Drip Paintings (fig. 3). In a groundbreaking combination of gesture and bodily movement, materials and gravitational pull, paint is flung, guided, and poured onto a horizontal canvas. The only partially controllable trails and drips that land all over the canvas once again raise the question as to the relationship between intuition, chance, and deliberate decisions. What kind of order—or disorder—awaits the viewer here?
Section V
When mention is made of the contemporary artist Fabienne Verdier, people often describe her as the “woman with the brush.” This is a reference to the unique utensils she has developed for herself, some almost as big as she is, which she uses on a canvas placed on the floor. Photographs of her work process have gained a similarly iconic status to Hans Namuth’s memorable photographs and films of Jackson Pollock in full flight creating his Drip Paintings (figs. 4 and 5).
Although Fabienne Verdier, born some fifty years after Pollock, was not substantively influenced by him in her artistic development, it seems that transcultural affinities1 and a comparable interest in various manifestations of movement, materials, and mark-making were crucial to both of them in the formation of their own distinctive paint techniques.
Section VI
The vertical position of the brush with its tip connecting with the horizontal picture carrier is one of the fundamental, codified techniques in certain schools of Chinese calligraphy and painting (fig. 6).2 During her ten years studying in China, Verdier absorbed complex calligraphic traditions going back more than two thousand years and did so with a degree of rigor that may well be unique in the Western art world.
Around 2006, following a highly consequential request—when the Zurich patron of the arts Hubert Looser commissioned Verdier to produce a series of responses to examples of Minimal Art and American gestural art that are today held in the collection at Kunsthaus Zürich—she systematically started to increase the size of her paintbrush in order that her paintings could look works by Donald Judd, Willem de Kooning, and Cy Twombly (figs. 7 and 8) in the eye. A hitherto largely overlooked outcome of that process was that little by little she discovered that gravity could in fact become a formative aspect of the painting process.
This is especially apparent in the Walking/Paintings that Verdier has been making since 2013. In these she replaces her brush with a paint container that she uses to pour trails of paint on the picture carrier in time with her own movements (pp. 40–43). The expressive nature of the ensuing paint trails is dependent on the speed that Verdier walks, on the consistency of the paint substance she has prepared herself, and not least on the height from which the paint is released.
Operating on that basis, Verdier arrives at an array of striking forms created by paint hitting a canvas (fig. 9). At the point of impact with the picture carrier the paint splatters outwards forming concentric rings and solidifying in an endlessly varied sequence of crater-shaped reliefs.
The paint is directed at the canvas in the studio, producing results that call to mind planetary cartography. The poetry of these paintings comes to the fore whenever moving matter encounters imagined vastness.
Section VII
In East Asian calligraphy the ink is generally thin and the formats relatively modest. The ink is quickly absorbed into the paper and does not leave any distinctly textured residue as it dries. More or less the same can be said of Pollock’s Drip Paintings, which are made using thin, free-flowing paints. That may be one reason why (to the best of my knowledge) no-one has as yet explored the importance of gravity with regard to either East Asian traditions or Pollock’s paintings.
At the same time—as Verdier herself has repeatedly pointed out—the vertical axis that she has adopted from East Asian art for her own work traditionally constitutes a deeply rooted cultural expression of the union of Heaven and Earth3. And she has deliberately sustained this all-embracing connection in her own compositions: it is the invisible axis of her paintings.
Section VIII
Around 2020 Fabienne Verdier realized her Vortex paintings, which create a connection between above and below (p. 23, pp. 32–35). Anyone facing one of these paintings in person instinctively senses that the spiraling gestures, which reach out beyond the edges of the large-format canvas, are pushing at the limits of what a human being can create whilst both keeping control and letting go.
Different degrees of pressure on the brush create either denser or more open paint trails, as if air could enter their substance. Besides the materiality of the paint applied with such an effort, in these works there is also a seemingly weight-free boundlessness. The physically tangible and the infinite meet here.
The titles of some of the paintings in this series recall especially moving arias by Mozart. What happens to the voice, the melodies, and the words when all the sounds have died away? Verdier presents the viewer with a continuum of presence and absence, unhampered by sharp boundaries or fixed poles. Both floating in open space and striking a balance between downforce and release are central to her work as a painter (pp. 36–39).
Section IX
One of the enduringly fascinating aspects of Pollock’s work is the fact that the paint he hurled at the canvas assumed forms that seem to evoke structures that were never deliberately planned as such. The painted marks thus not only invite viewers to observe the material’s actual behavior, they also give rise to associations with the night sky and cosmic realms. At the time when these paintings came to life, the astronomical images that are now widely known and available were of course still a thing of the future.
It was not until 1990 that the Hubble Space Telescope became operational and started to produce images of galaxies and cosmic formations with chaotic patterns that reminded many people of Pollock’s Drip Paintings. While Pollock himself tended to discuss his work in factual terms based on observation—as in the comment, “My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout”4—later on some commentators made a connection between statements of that kind and modern notions of a decentered or boundless universe.
Section X
When Pollock directed paint onto the canvas from various positions, he rendered the impact of gravity visible and effectively exploited it as a compositional method. With the demise of the traditional brushstroke, motifs are no longer represented in the old way: instead they start to self-generate from the interaction of gravity, materials, and movement.
Meanwhile Verdier deliberately integrates gravity into culturally conditioned, vertically structured systems. In her paintings the order created by Earth’s gravitational pull is not only visible, it is also palpably transient. Her focus returns time and again to transitions: between proximity and distance, downforce and release, presence and disappearance.
For all the individuality and independence of these two artists, they share the same willingness to open up their work process to forces that they can only partially control. In their hands form arises not only from subjective expression but also from the interplay of body, materials, movement, and gravity.
Jackson Pollock once put that into words: “The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world—in other words—expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.”5
And elsewhere: “It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique.”6
Perhaps the special appeal of Fabienne Verdier’s work today is due to the fact that they visibly illustrate the extent to which painting is itself sustained by forces that are greater than any human being—yet only acquire a form of their own through human efforts and attention.
Translated from the German by Fiona Elliott
Notes
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Jackson Pollock, who never left the United States, mainly gained his knowledge of other cultures and epochs from fellow artists, books, and exhibits in museum collections. By way of an example: he greatly admired the painter Mark Tobey, who traveled extensively in China and Japan in 1934. During that trip Tobey spent some months in a Zen Buddhist monastery, which profoundly influenced his subsequent work. For a recent essay on Jackson Pollock and calligraphy, see Kakei Nanako, “Oriental Calligraphy in Jackson Pollock: A Study of the Formation of the Black Paintings,” Aesthetics 2, 2018, 45–54.
Verdier’s particular interest in Chinese art and culture is documented in detail in Fabienne Verdier, Passenger of Silence: My Quest for the Ancient Arts in Post-Cultural Revolution China (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2024) (first published by Albin Michel, Paris 2003). This publication contains an afterword by Corinna Thierolf and an annex explaining selected concepts in Chinese aesthetics, 324–42. ↑
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See Jean François Billeter, “Essai sur l’art chinois de l’écriture et ses fondements” (Paris: Editions Allia, 2010), 57–110. See also, in Verdier 2024 (see note 1), the entry “Vertical tip of the brush,” 341f. Pollock referred to his vertical approach to painting in an interview in 1950: “I paint on the floor and this isn’t unusual—the Orientals did that,” in William Wright, “An Interview with Jackson Pollock,” Arts & Architecture 67, no. 2 (February 1950), 22–23. ↑
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For a detailed account of the importance of this axis for the artist, see Corinna Thierolf, “On the works of Fabienne Verdier in the Palazzo Torlonia,” in Fabienne Verdier, Palazzo Torlonia (Paris: Editions Xavier Barral, 2011), 7–21, especially 8f. ↑
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Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 78. ↑
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Jackson Pollock, interviewed by William Wright in the summer of 1950, in Francis Valentine O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw (eds.), Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, vol. 4 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 249. ↑
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Ibid. ↑
On view
Gravity Made Visible Fabienne Verdier Meets Jackson Pollock
Horn, Switzerland · Through February 27, 2027
Curated by Corinna Thierolf, art historian and chief curator for post-war art at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, from 2002 to 2020
Private viewings in Horn can be arranged until the exhibition closes on February 27, 2027.
The catalogue
A fully illustrated catalogue with a new essay by Corinna Thierolf is published by the gallery on the occasion of the exhibition.
Please include your postal address.
Text © 2026 Corinna Thierolf. Translated from the German by Fiona Elliott. First published in Gravity Made Visible: Fabienne Verdier Meets Jackson Pollock, american contemporary art GALLERY Switzerland AG, 2026 (ISBN 978-3-929888-99-7).
Fabienne Verdier © 2026 Fabienne Verdier / 2026, ProLitteris, Zurich. Jackson Pollock © 2026 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / 2026, ProLitteris, Zurich. Courtesy of american contemporary art GALLERY Switzerland. Further credits are given with each figure.
