Claude Vergez
Drawing, painting, printmaking
Claude Temin-Vergez graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2001 and St Martins College in 1998. She was awarded the Stanley Picker Fellowship in painting in 2002 and the Abbey Fellowship in painting at the British School at Rome in 2005. In 2023 she was selected for the Contemporary British Painting Prize.
She exhibits widely internationally and nationally.
"The work develops on the tradition of modernist gestural abstraction in painting, endgames, grid mutations and its relationship with ornamentation and nature. The process is informed by an extensive daily drawing practice, lines intuitively recombine geometric formations, automatic writing and found images. In a world where our attention span is growing ever shorter the work demands slow looking and a distillation of experience."
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My work develops on the tradition of modernist gestural abstraction in painting, endgames, grid mutations and its relationship with ornamentation and nature. The process is informed by an extensive daily drawing practice, lines intuitively recombine geometric formations, automatic writing and found images.
These explorations have led to an interest in patterns and geometry in nature and patterns within art itself (e.g. Japanese textiles and Islamic art) and Geometric abstraction.
Mondrian, Bridget Riley, Tess Jaray and the late Brice Marden are all time heroes.
The work combines a formal structure that is “fleshed out in colour”.
Looking at painting for me is a transformative experience that opens doors, it’s not about looking at a picture or a narrative, it’s a physical experience. To realise that someone made it with their hands, the thought is made manifest with the materiality of paint and the gesture of the artist.
I aim to share this experience with the viewer. I don't describe the world in an illustrative way, although the work is not flat and the drawn elements are well defined. I don’t offer a point of focus. In a world where our attention span is growing ever shorter, the work demands slow looking and a distillation of experience. So the eye wanders around using peripheral vision or haptic vision where the sense of touch, smell and hearing becomes heightened like touching with one’s eyes.
