FERNBERGER

Vicky Colombet (b. 1953, Paris) lives and works between the Hudson Valley, New York City and Paris.

Colombet was raised in Paris by her French father and Filipino mother, who traveled extensively throughout Asia with her. These early travels and exposure to eastern culture and philosophy proved incredibly influential in her later artistic development.

While studying at the Sorbonne, Colombet was enveloped in a progressive Parisian Intelligentsia. Helmed by Simone de Beauvoir, Colombet co-founded the "Women's Rights League" and the newspaper, "The Feminist News". She also collaborated with iconic French actress and outspoken Feminist Delphine Seyrig on several Feminist projects including her film "Be Pretty and Shut Up" (1981).

Colombet began her career as a painter in her early twenties, studying in the atelier of French painter Henri Dimier (1899-1986), who introduced Colombet to a painstaking process of deconstructed painting involving grinding and mixing raw pigments with various solvents (oil, copal, plaster and water) from which Colombet evolved and created her own technique. Experimenting with the weights of pigments, their type of granulation, chemical response, their specific vibrations and steps for grinding, she creates her otherworldly compositions.

In the early 1980s, during a time when painting was declared “dead”, Colombet created a type of painting that did not announce itself as painting. With the aim of pausing viewers upon encountering her work, Colombet developed her singular style and methodology of painting to resemble photochemical development processes or even a form of printing, but distinctly not painting. Despite using incredibly traditional painting materials, Colombet’s obfuscation of her own hand in the work presents something iconoclastic and enigmatic.

As she developed her own style and technique of painting, Colombet also embarked on a deeper study of Buddhism (to which she had been exposed during her childhood travels) with Vietnamese monk and peace activist, Thích Nhất Hạnh. Her initial rigorous study at Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery in the south of France, and her continued Buddhist practice have tremendously affected her work.

Her flattened but incredibly dimensional works have the power to evoke Buddhist concepts of oneness–that the macro and the micro exist on the same continuum. Partnered with her existing interest in the works of painters with ethereal, mathematical and philosophical leanings such as Fra Angelico, Piero Della Francesca, Ad Reinhardt, Yves Klein, Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin, Colombet has developed a style completely her own. She believes the use of pure pigment, chemical compounds born of the cosmos, gives unique vibrations and emotional resonance to her work.

In the intervening years, Colombet has shown her work extensively internationally. She was recently the subject of the exhibition, “Unexpected Dialogue: Monet/Colombet” that paired her work with Claude Monet’s at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, for which the museum produced an exhibition catalogue. Her work is included in the collections of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, as well as several international private collections. She has been awarded the Esther and Adolf Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2001) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2014).