Françoise Gilot
FRANÇOISE GILOT
1921, NEUILLY-SUR-SEINE (F) - 2023, NEW YORK (USA)
Françoise Gilot was a legend—the woman who left Picasso, the enduring friend of Endre Rozsda, and the wife and companion of the world-famous research doctor, Dr. Jonas Salk. She navigated between Paris and New York, embodying the essence of an eternal woman.
Gilot's painterly career is a triumph that gradually took its rightful place over the last decades. She fought numerous battles to shed the title of "Picasso's muse" and gain recognition as a first-rate artist in her own right.
Her art traces its roots back to the revolutionary heyday of the twentieth century, where she had direct contact with notable personalities such as Braque, Matisse, Paul Éluard, André Breton, Aragon, Cocteau, and Robert Capa. Her early works reveal the influence of Matisse and Braque. Between 1941 and 1944, she attended painting classes in the Paris-based studio of the Hungarian artist Endre Rozsda. In her youth, she was the partner and muse of Pablo Picasso for ten years, yet she preserved her own artistic style throughout their cohabitation.
She had her first important exhibition in Paris in 1943, after which she signed a contract with the renowned art dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler. Her first exhibit with Kahnweiler's famed Galerie Louise Leiris took place in 1952 in Paris, which became a critical moment in her life and career. A highly versatile artist, Gilot devoted herself with great enthusiasm to different printing techniques. In the 1950s, she became the first woman deemed worthy to print lithographs in the legendary Mourlot Atelier in Paris.
Delving into the realms of mythology, symbolism, and the power of memory, Gilot's work explores complex philosophical ideas with spontaneity and freedom.
Her stature as an artist and the value of her work has increased over the years. In 2021 her painting Paloma à la Guitare, a 1965 portrait of her daughter, sold for $1.3 million at Sotheby's in London. As of January 2022, her work has been on exhibit in multiple leading museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Pompidou. At Christie's in Hong Kong, her artwork entitled "Living Forest," , an abstract canvas created in 1977, also sold for $1.3 million.
Francoise Gilot's career lasted eight decades, amassing a body of work comprising 1,600 paintings and 3,600 works on paper.
The relationship between Françoise Gilot and the Várfok Gallery, one of Hungary's oldest contemporary art galleries, originated through Endre Rozsda, the Hungarian Surrealist painter and a great friend of Gilot. He introduced Károly Szalóky, the owner of the gallery, to Gilot in 1999. Since 2000, the Várfok Gallery has hosted several solo exhibitions of Gilot's unparalleled œuvre and is proud to be the only European gallery to have maintained a personal relationship with the artist over the decades, and to present the largest collection of her work available in Europe.
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