Fabienne Verdier

Fabienne Verdier was born in Paris in 1962 and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse, graduating in 1983, before pursuing studies at INALCO in Paris. In 1984, a post-graduate scholarship enabled her to travel to Chongqing, where she spent nearly a decade at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, immersing herself in painting, calligraphy, and philosophy under the guidance of master Huang Yuan and other teachers. She became the first non-Chinese woman to receive a post-graduate diploma in fine arts from that institution — a distinction that speaks to the depth and rigour of her formation. Returning to France in 1993, she settled in Île-de-France and developed a singular practice that fuses the gestural logic of Chinese calligraphic tradition with the spatial ambitions of Western abstraction, working at monumental scale with suspended brushes and tools of her own devising.

Verdier's exhibition history spans four decades and reaches across Europe, Asia, and North America. Early solo presentations in Hong Kong and Chongqing gave way to a solo at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 2003 and a retrospective at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2006. Subsequent years brought exhibitions at the Musée Guimet, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich — where a dedicated dialogue with the work of Sigmar Polke was staged in 2017 — the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, and the Musée Camille Claudel in Nogent-sur-Seine, among many others. Her engagement with other disciplines has been equally sustained: a cycle of paintings entered the collection of The Juilliard School in New York, large-scale works were integrated into the architecture of the Majunga Tower in La Défense, and she was commissioned to create the official poster for the Festival d'Avignon in 1998 and for Roland-Garros in 2018. A cycle of twenty-two paintings was produced for the fiftieth-anniversary edition of the Le Petit Robert dictionary in 2016, and her 2003 memoir — published in French as Passagère du silence — remains the essential account of her apprenticeship years in China.

Her work enters institutional collections across Europe and beyond, including the Musée national d'Art moderne at the Centre Pompidou, the Pinakothek der Moderne, the Kunsthaus Zurich, the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, the Musée Cernuschi, the Saarlandmuseum, and the Fondation Hubert Looser, among others. The Collection Pinault and the Barbier-Mueller Collection are among the private holdings that include her work. Verdier is represented primarily by Galerie Lelong & Co. in Paris and New York, and by Waddington Custot in London, with regional representation through Custot Gallery Dubai, Patrick Derom Gallery in Brussels, and Alisan Fine Arts in Hong Kong. In 2025, a major solo exhibition titled Mute opened at the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine in Paris, accompanied by a solo presentation at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire and the publication of a substantial autobiographical monograph, Le Dragon de brume / The Dragon's Brush, tracing her life and practice from childhood through her Chinese apprenticeship to her current work in Île-de-France.