Eugene Leroy Abstract Composition, Artist Proof Titled "Sleep", Signed

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Eugene Leroy original artist proof, eau forte or etching, titled "Sleep".
Hand-signed on the lower right, titled and other mentions … Read more Eugene Leroy original artist proof, eau forte or etching, titled "Sleep".
Hand-signed on the lower right, titled and other mentions written in pencil on the left and center.

Eugene Leroy (1910-2000)
Listed artist and represented by internationally recognized galleries.

Eugène Leroy spent most of his career in rural isolation and relative obscurity until the 1980s, when figurative painting came back into vogue and his work became increasingly recognized both in his native France and overseas.

A native of Tourcoing, France, he was a most singular artist whose work left its mark on the 20th century. Through a powerful connection to matter without ever excluding the depicted subject, Leroy always worked with traditional pictorial genres, like the nude and self-portrait, while reinventing the viewer’s perception. After remaining relatively unknown for many years, his oeuvre took on an international dimension in the 1980s after he met the art dealer and collector Michael Werner.

Through a rich ensemble of paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and artworks from his personal collection that punctuate his evolution from 1930 to 2000, his sons made an exceptional donation to the Musee des Beaux Art in his hometown of Tourcoing. Eugene Leroy was a multifaceted and unusual artist.

Leroy labored on canvases for months, sometimes years, applying layer after layer of oil paint, brushing, scraping, and digging it and squeezing directly from the tube until the original image was barely discernible. The thick, textured physicality of his surfaces has prompted comparisons with Rembrandt, van Gogh, and Willem de Kooning, while the fragmentation of his subjects into tiny flecks of color and light recalls aspects of both Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism.

A wonderful decorative piece of art.
Professionally framed, measures: 20 3/8" W x 17 3/4" H x 1" D

Although his oeuvre has long remained under the radar, Eugène Leroy is counted among the greatest artists of the twentieth century. It was only in 1988 that his first major Parisian exhibition was held at the Musée d'Art Moderne in the ARC spaces. Spanning over sixty years, the output of this painter – who was born in Tourcoing in 1910 and died in 2000 – was equally based on the perception of the real and an ideal vision of painting.

Partial to the old masters and willingly anachronistic, Eugène Leroy revisited traditional iconographic subjects such as nudes, self-portraits, still lifes, or landscapes throughout his lifetime. More than a retrospective, the exhibition layout, organized thematically, highlights the complexity of a lengthy creative process and pictorial experimentation.

For years Eugène Leroy juggled his painting activity with a career as a Latin and Greek teacher. Since his first solo show, held in Lille in 1937, he has made his mark as an artist in a category of his own. He exhibited his canvases in Paris in 1943, then participated in several iterations of the Salon de Mai in the 1950s. He travelled often in Europe, then to the United States and Russia, where he visited museum collections, seeking to associate his painting with that of the great masters and hone the pictorial knowledge essential to his work. In 1958, he moved into a small home-studio in Wasquehal, in northern France.

The Parisian gallery Claude Bernard exhibited his work in 1961. lt was on that occasion that the German painter Georg BaseIitz and the dealer Michael Werner discovered his work. "I found in it images, as brown as fields, as stone, as wood, as mass, as scent. A simple Dutch composition with an unheard-of accumulation of colors. A heap of splattered sheet metal from a dovecote that enlightened me," wrote Baselitz.

In 1978, his eldest son opened the Jean Leroy gallery in Paris, where he regularly presented his father's work. In 1982, Jan Hoet, then director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Gand, Belgium, whom Leroy had met during a trip to the United States, devoted a major exhibition to his work and included him in Documenta 9 in Kassel. At the same time, the establishment of a fruitful collaboration with Michael Werner allowed Eugène Leroy's oeuvre to gain European and international recognition.

As Bernard Marcadé has pointed out, "the contribution of Eugène Leroy's oeuvre to twentieth century art is decisive because it bears witness to an incessantly reiterated combat of painting and image." Beyond its thickness - but also thanks to it - this painting creates a new pictorial language that is deeply rooted in the real without any concern for its legibility.

Eugène Leroy sought to capture a truth about perception while preserving the emotion that makes it possible. "All I have ever tried to do in painting is reach [ ... ] a kind of absence almost, so that painting is totaIly itself," he stated in 1979. He reworked his canvases, sometimes over the course of several years, until the quasi-disappearance of the subject. The difficulty of discerning at first glance the painted motif allows the viewer to linger aver the physical presence of the work. His painting was " an act of memory, a projection forward across the present darkness of history," to borrow the poet Yves Bonnefoy's well-turned phrase about Rimbaud.

Partial to the old masters and willingly anachronistic, Eugène Leroy revisited traditional iconographic subjects such as nudes, self-portraits, still lifes, or landscapes throughout his lifetime. More than a retrospective, the exhibition layout, organized thematically, highlights the complexity of a lengthy creative process and pictorial experimentation.

Eugène Leroy's works are held in major public and private collections in France and abroad. With around forty paintings and drawing, acquired thanks to purchases and regular donations since 1988, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris is now considered a reference place for the artist. See less