The French painter, sculptor and light artist François Morellet has died, aged 90. His Paris-based gallery Kamel Mennour, confirmed the news and paid tribute to his “lively, creative, mischievous, luminous spirit” on Twitter.
Born in 1926 in Cholet, western France, Morellet taught himself to paint as a teenager, pursuing art alongside studying Russian and working in the family business (which he continued to manage until 1975). After a brief period of semi-figurative painting and sculpture inspired by Oceanic art, he turned to abstraction in 1950, when he had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Creuze in Paris. In 1960, he co-founded the activist collective of kinetic and optical art Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (Grav) with Julio Le Parc and others. Its manifesto called for “provocation” and “visual aggression”, activating spectators through works and performances harnessing the properties of light.
Industrially-produced neon tubes served as Morellet’s material of choice for six decades, but his sculptures and light installations have only gained commercial and international recognition relatively recently. “In 1963 my neon works were provocative, vulgar and unsaleable—I had to wait 20 years to sell my first one. Today they are stylish, expensive and very trendy,” Morellet told Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, in an interview earlier this year.
In France, Morellet is considered among the most important artists of his generation, receiving a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2011. The year before, he became the second living artist to create a permanent commission for the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Morellet redesigned the bay windows and oculi of the venerable museum’s Lefuel staircase to let in new light.
Morellet’s works have drawn comparisons to US Minimalists such as Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin and are represented in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Centre Pompidou. His early canvases currently hang alongside works by his friend, the late Ellsworth Kelly, in a dedicated collection gallery at the Paris institution. Exhibitions marking his 90th birthday opened last month in London at the Mayor Gallery and Annely Fine Art and at Dan Galeria in Sao Paulo.
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