The Musée Picasso Antibes dedicates a major exhibition Jouer la peinture to Yves Zurstrassen’s work. The exhibition, curated by Jean-Louis Andral, brings together ninety-four paintings dating from 2013 to 2023, covering the past ten years of the artist’s work.
For the last forty years, Yves Zurstrassen has been exploring the free figures of abstraction. A selftaught painter and a keen user of free colour, Zurstrassen has developed a particular technique of collage and stripping of paper shapes, which he uses as stencils on superimposed layers of paint. The succession of applications and withdrawals, where colours are in turn added and subtracted, traps time in the painting – the last of them to appear on the canvas is actually the first he applied. This new temporality affirms the gesture, while simultaneously erasing it, when the artist’s intuition serves his original concept of the composition, slowly elaborated through a series of colour studies.
