ROBERT COMBAS (Lyon, 1957).
Untitled, 1992, from the Suite Olympic Centennial.
Lithograph on 270 grams Vélin d'Arches paper, copy 110/250.
Signed, dated and numbered in pencil.
This work is part of the "Suite Olympic Centennial", complete edition 110/250, which will be auctioned on 27 September 2022, in 50 consecutive lots numbered 35245230 to 35245280.
Measurements: 90 x 63 cm.
A French painter and sculptor, Robert Combas trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the town of Sete, in south-eastern France, and held his first solo exhibition in 1980. He is considered to be the co-founding father of free figuration, a movement that began in Paris in 1980 as a reaction to the minimalism and conceptual art that were becoming established in the French capital at the time. Free figuration, "a painting that does not deny its primitive instincts or its desire for culture" according to Combas himself, has its roots in Fauvism and Expressionism and establishes a connecting thread with the Neo-Expressionist movement and graffiti art. Combas's works therefore become a critique of society in general, through an intense style based on the use of powerful, vivid and passionate colours that leave no centimetre of the canvas free, outlining the figures he depicts in black.
The Olympic Suite is made up of 50 lithographs and serigraphs chosen to represent various contemporary artistic trends. It was published to commemorate the first centenary of modern Olympism. The artists chosen are defined by diverse movements and pictorial currents, from the conceptualism and minimalism of "Ben" Vautier, the lyrical abstraction of Yasse Tabuchi, the painting of Oleg Tselkov who concentrates on the human figure, intensely expressive and treated with forceful forms and intense colours that seek to reflect the conflicts and violence of his time, and finally the work of André Arabis, clearly abstract and geometric.