Olivier Debré (1920-1999) is a French painter.
He studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Painter of the exaltation of color and wide spaces, Olivier Debré is a key artist of post-war Lyrical Abstraction.
During the World's Fair in 1937, the vision of Pablo Picasso's famous Guernica left a profound impression on him.
A few years later, Olivier Debré met the master of Cubism, who invited him to spend the winter of 1942 in his Parisian studio.
During this period, the artist, involved in the resistance of the Maquis, found in art and graphic expression a way to exult in the fear of war.
At the turn of the 1950s, the artist worked with paint with a flat knife to build his paintings: they are still lifes or abstract landscapes, solidly constructed, worked on the horizontal plane, or large vertical paintings built by large impastos from which the silhouette of a man in feet stands out: these are the character-signs, characteristic of the 1950s, in sober, almost monochrome colors.
At this time, he met other painters of Lyrical Abstraction such as Gérard Schneider, Jean-Michel Atlan, Pierre Soulages and Hans Hartung.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Olivier Debré turned fully to the landscape, which would henceforth be his field of exploitation.
From the 1970s, Olivier Debré's painting found its formal balance in the square format that the artist most often favored. Olivier Debré will seek a form of artistic expression free from any figurative constraints, favoring the spontaneity of the gesture and the free circulation of color.
The painting, characterized by vibrant colors and dynamic forms, aims to evoke states of mind and interior landscapes.
His vibrant canvases, marked by bright colors and free gestures, reflect a deep connection with nature and light.
Olivier Debré's fluid compositions evoke a feeling of incessant movement, inviting the viewer to plunge into a unique sensory universe.
Painter of large spaces, the work of Olivier Debré is of incredible vitality.
After painting the stage curtains for the Comédie-Française in Paris, a public commission in 1987, and for the new Hong Kong Opera, at the request of the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Opera and Music in 1989, the artist painted, just one year before his death, the artist painted the stage curtain of the new Shanghai Opera in 1998.
Although Olivier Debré left us in 1999, his artistic heritage continues to resonate today.
Her daring exploration of abstraction and her relentless pursuit of beauty and emotion continue to inspire artists around the world.

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“The plane structure of the space of the canvases becomes a sphere and engages in the universal circle of the sky. ”
‍Olivier Debré