artist/ Gauthier

France

Oscar Gauthier was born in 1921 in Fours, Nièvre. He trained at the Grande Chaumière and in Othon Friesz’s studio in Paris. He graduated from the Beaux-arts de Paris in 1947 and turned his attention to abstraction in 1948 after a trip to the United States.
He was one of the leading exponents of lyrical abstraction in the immediate post-war period.
From the start of his career, Oscar Gauthier had several solo exhibitions in galleries. In the 1950s, the thick material was spread with a knife with a wild vivacity that reflected his own personality, and came close to abstract expressionism. Later, the brush replaced the knife and Gauthier’s artistic expression moved towards purification and the search for the essential.
Oscar Gauthier can be described as an abstract landscape painter, preoccupied with movement and light. He advocated painting without an apparent subject, where lines, shapes and colours give life to the composition, and are its protagonists.
Oscar Gauthier died on 17 July 2009 in Nevers, and is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.