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Mar 04, 2025
Jean Miotte, L’invitation au voyage
6 Mars – 19 Avril 2025
Galerie Diane de Polignac
Some artists take the understanding of their art to the very furthest reaches. Jean Miotte pushed the experience of life very far. He did not just want to paint: he had to paint. Painting became essential to him, in order to live. He traversed the self through the act of painting, with his sights set on a truth that, like a mirage, projected itself ever further away. This was how he travelled, towards a point that would bring him closer to the mystery of life. And this path, which took him on a journey within himself, also led him to the four corners of the world: to Syria, to the French cultural centre in Damascus, where he gave lectures; to the museum in Aleppo, where he exhibited his work; to China, where he was the first Western artist to be exhibited after the death of Mao Zedong; to Germany, where his second wife Dorothée Keeser, a great patron of his work, was from; and to the United States, where his foundation was based from 2002 to 2013.
What at first glance may appear to be a gestural style of painting, sometimes dazzling and incisive, sometimes trembling and delicate, is in fact the trace, or rather the testimony, of a continuous motion towards inner realms. Each work represents a step along the path of this journey, which is not theorised but lived through experience. A self-taught artist, Jean Miotte did not identify with any particular school – neither New York nor Paris. He made his way alone, from one encounter to the next. He bounced along when opportunities arose as others may jump from stone to stone to cross a stream.
At the age of 19, while engaged in military service, Miotte caught tuberculosis. He was diagnosed with a cavity in his right lung “as big as a potato” and was given just three months to live. Miotte left the hospital and headed straight for the Côte d’Azur, to enjoy the sun for one last time. When he returned to Paris and paid a visit to his doctor, the cavity in his lung had shrunk to the size of a ten-cent coin dime.
“What on earth have you been doing lately? asked the astonished doctor.
Nothing more than living as I please,” replied Miotte, before launching into an account of the extraordinary life that he had been leading.
For Miotte, life always prevailed over death, pulsing and gushing over his canvases, chasing away the shadows to make way for light.
Jean Miotte : Travels Beyond / A Journey Within
Camille Laura Villet
*Essayist, PhD in philosophy and psychoanalytic anthropology
Mar 04, 2025
Jean Miotte Return to China
Jan 10 — Mar 15, 2025
Shanghai
Galerie Almine Rech
Almine Rech Shanghai is pleased to announce Jean Miotte's second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from January 10 to March 15, 2025. In 1980, Miotte was the first Western painter to be invited to show his work after Mao’s regime.
Painting is a gesture from within
Almine Rech Shanghai is pleased to present twelve paintings by French artist Jean Miotte (1926-2016), one of the masters of Art Informel. Miotte always refused to be associated with any particular school—conveniently forgetting that his work was shown in the “Informel” section at the first Paris Biennial in 1959. He expressed a personal lyricism that found its source in the energy of unresolved gestures—something that differentiates him from other abstract painters of his time.
His artistic impulse contained an inherent anxiety from the acknowledged risk of avoiding the pitfalls of triviality and indulgence. He had to face the possible failure of achieving a painting whose difficulties he strove to resolve through pictorial developments.
— Lydia Harambourg, historian, writer, art critic, Correspondent Member of the Institut de France, Académie des beaux-arts
Jan 31, 2025
Jean Miotte
Galerie Diane de Polignac and Galerie Almine Rech
Jean Miotte Foundation is pleased to announce the collaboration between Diane de Polignac gallery and Almine Rech gallery for the global representation of Jean Miotte’s Estate.
From September 7th to 10th, 2023, Almine Rech will feature Jean Miotte’s work at Independent 20th Century fair in New York.
In conjunction with this event, Diane de Polignac gallery will present an exhibition “Jean Miotte & the dance” in October 2023.
Jan 27, 2025
Jean Miotte
September 7 – 10, 2023
Jean Miotte’s solo show at Independant New York, by Galerie Almine Rech.
Jan 27, 2025
Jean Miotte Un geste qu’on porte en soi Harmonie, impulsion, équilibre
September 15 – October 10, 2022
Galerie Diane de Polignac, Paris
In the summer of 2004, Jean Miotte welcomed me to his estate in Pignans, in the Var region of France. A major artist and icon of French painting in the second half of the 20th century, this exceptional figure of the lyrical abstraction movement – with its endless variations – captured movement as the very essence of life. After crossing a pine forest with its intoxicating fragrances, the studio appeared in a rare display of dynamic, sonorous and colourful flamboyance.
Lydia Harambourg
Jan 27, 2025
Jean Miotte
June 3 juin – July 3, 2021
Galerie Diane de Polignac
“Jean Miotte fit perfectly into the artistic context of the second half of the 20th century where movement became important in painting with Lyrical Abstraction, Action Painting, Kinetic Art, Abstract Expressionism, performance and so on. Jean Miotte’s paintings were created with an immediate gesture, a dazzling motion. “Movement is my life” he recalled.”…