Jean-François LARRIEU

BIOGRAPHY

Born in the Midi-Pyrénées, France, in 1960, Jean-François Larrieu made a spectacular debut as an artist by winning the Grand Prize by François Villon Academy; the painting prize by the Béarnais museum of the city of Pau in his teens.

Since 1990, he has presided over the Salon d’Automne de Paris and over the government- affiliated Foundation for Graphic and Plastic Arts. He is also the president of the Foundation of the Historic Salons of the Grand Palais and President of the Taylor Foundation in Paris since 2010.

Jean-François Larrieu has exhibited in over sixty solo exhibitions worldwide since the beginning of his career in 1982. His work has been the focus of major museum exhibitions including the Museum of Modern Art, Nanjing, China; the National Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; the Santilana Foundation, Santander, Spain; the Museum Sursock, Beirut, Lebanon; the Fine Arts Museum, Shanghai, China; the Lima Museum, Lima, Peru; the Okinawa Garden Museum, Tokyo, Japan and the Fine Arts Museum, Bordeaux, France.

TECHNIQUE

Larrieu loves to play with color, most often in warm and scintillating hues. It’s what gives his work energy and movement. The abundance of details brings a softened sense to the whole piece.

Larrieu’s paintings use the accumulation of an ensemble of codes, a mysterious pictorial language where words are triangles, circles and squares, which come together as an explicit and audible whole. Larrieu’s style drifts between the abstraction of the infinitely petite to the figurative of the infinitely grand. To dive into a Larrieu painting is to launch oneself on a journey of discovery.