The Centre Georges Pompidou is holding a retrospective exhibition devoted to Gérard Garouste, one of the most important contemporary French painters, born in 1946, who is a figurationist without concession.

Gérard Garouste was a student at the Beaux-arts de Paris at the end of the 1960s, and his reading of Marcel Duchamp’s interviews with Pierre Cabanne prompted him to defy the ban on painting at a time when conceptual practices were the order of the day.

Thus, he became a painter, in the most traditional sense of the term, focusing on technique, which he never ceased to perfect, by observing the masters in the Louvre: Poussin, El Greco, Tintoretto…

In the 1980s, he began to create large paintings under the sign of Greek mythology, to which he superimposed his personal mythology around the figures of the Classic, the Indian, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, which, according to him, is in all of us.

Alongside 120 major paintings, often of very large format, the exhibition also gives a place to the sculpture and graphic work.

This exhibition allows us to grasp the full richness of Gérard Garouste’s unclassifiable career, whose life of study, but also of madness, and his enigmatic work, feed off each other in a striking dialogue.

With his large figurative canvases, the artist revisits the history of art through the genres of painting, which he seeks to exhaust.

The exhibition dedicated to him follows step by step the path and the personal mythology of one of the most important French painters.

Museum : Centre Georges Pompidou

Address : Place Georges Pompidou 75004 Paris

Price : 15€.

Schedule: open from Wednesday to Tuesday from 11 am to 9 pm.

Metro : Hôtel de Ville station lines 1 and 11

Châtelet station lines 1, 4, 7, 11 and 14

RER : Châtelet-les Halles lines A, B, D