Aurélie Nemours

French female artist Aurelie Nemours was born in  1910

She has been exhibiting at the Oniris gallery since 1988

She passed away in 2005 at the age of 94

Aurelie Nemours had committed herself to the abstraction path since 1949, developing an abstract painting, built from pure colours and geometric forms from the square, but without dogmatism or systematism. His compositions are strictly arranged in the plane, based on the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical.

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

Artistic work is based on availability. To do this, you have to free yourself, to empty yourself and even lose your footing, because that's where the revelation of being is possible. Art must be fertilized by such instants.

His painting generally has few colours (sometimes it only involves black and white), but always plays on the intensity of the coloured fields. The painting uses colour chords that can evoke tones, sonorities, describe climates. His work is characterized both by its rigour but also by a very strong sensitivity, even a great spirituality. For Aurelie Nemours, to paint was "to seek the truth of the world". She had, she said, "painting in her heart and in her head".

Aurelie Nemours is the great lady of concrete art, and not only in her native France. Her work, which the museums of Ludwigshafen, Bottrop and Ingolstadt presented in Germany as part of a major retrospective exhibition in 1995, enjoys the highest international esteem. It is one of the most prominent works of concrete art and presents itself as the European variant of important American developments such as Ad Reinhardt's "Colorfield Painting" or "Minimal Art".

In his works from the 1940s and 1950s, free forms and diagonal structures create open patterns of coloured surfaces. The serial works grouped under the title "Rhythm of the Millimeter", the rigorous "Angles", relate two or more colors. Also, the irregular formal elements of the "Number and Chance" series, the radiant canvases of the monochrome "Quartets" and "Columns" are all elements that make up his 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 "systematist" Colour field painting. Her formal appreciations most often proceed from an intuitive approach and aim to give rhythm to the pictorial space. The artist uses only a few colours, but the complex mixtures she uses generate vibrant tones of life.

The works of Aurelie Nemours are meditative paintings which, through the extreme reduction of colours and forms, visualize ideas or laws underlying appearances and trigger reflections on the globality and the future of the universe. Conscious of updating principles in the sense of abstraction, Aurélie Nemours has created an impressive work of great visual strength and spirituality. In "Nemours", edited by R. W. Gassen and L. von Mengden, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Wienand Verlag, 1995.