François
Morellet

Self-taught artist François Morellet has conducted a radical exploration of the fields of geometric abstraction throughout his work. Discovering the vanguard abstract masters in the early 1950s led him to give up figurative art. From then on, his approach was based on mathematical systems whose "absurdly logical" rules left much to chance.

His output includes painting, sculpture, in situ interventions in the city and architecture and light installations. An active representative of kinetic art in France in the early 1960s, he was particularly passionate about the creative and dreamlike potential of neon, a new industrial material that later became inseparable from his artistic practice.

Morellet's work, like the pioneering installation Neons 0°, 45°, 90°, 135° with 4 interfering rhythms, will be shown for the first time by the Pinault Collection during the exhibition “Au-delà de la couleur” (“Beyond Colour”) at the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes in June 2021.