Art Plural Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural solo exhibition of French artist Fabienne Verdier in Southeast Asia. The exhibition runs from 25 January to 9 March 2013 and features her latest drawings and large-scale paintings.

Fabienne Verdier will be sharing about her work and philosophy at an art talk organised by the gallery at a date to be confirmed later. A comprehensive, fully-illustrated art book will be published on this occasion. For her Southeast Asian premiere, Fabienne Verdier explores the theme of abstract landscapes inspired by her journey by the coastline of Norway. Verdier seeks inspiration from the living – the movement of life forces through stone and soil. Encapsulating the transience of things, Verdier’s forms are restrained yet spontaneous.

In the art world, Fabienne Verdier is the only French artist who has ever mastered traditional ink painting. Verdier has dedicated almost a decade to spending her life in China for an apprenticeship with master calligraphers in the 1980’s, as related in her bestselling novel Passagère du Silence. More than honing her craft, she had left with a heart of asceticism and a profound understanding that beneath the trajectory of a brush stroke lies the spirit of life.

Fabienne Verdier transcends borders, bridging Asian philosophy with Western minimal abstraction which she had later revisited. Paying homage to early Flemish masters of the 15th Century, she transcribes the essence of her being onto the canvas with bright flashes of colours. Ultimately, the seeds that she had sowed had bloomed into her own artistic language. To the artist, each new painting is an experiment of the moment as a way to encapsulate the intensity and the reflection of a precise instant. Placing herself at the centre rather than the edge of the canvas, Verdier identifies herself with the painting, an embodiment of a synthesis between the body and the flux that surrounds it. Fabienne Verdier paints in repose, a pure reflection of the maelstrom of life.