Born in 1953 in Paris, Dominique Gauthier lives and works in Lavérune, on the outskirts of Montpellier. Trained at the Marseille School of Fine Arts, he was championed by gallery owner Jean Fournier from his earliest works, monumental Operas composed of an assemblage of canvases and mixed materials. While a work from this series joined the collections of the Musée Fabre in 1982, followed by a second in the early 2000s, the artist honored the museum in 2020 with an exceptional donation of nearly ten canvases and around thirty graphic works, revealing the diversity of his pictorial practice. This practice evolves between different periods, from a notable thick and organic material in the Provisions for Cimabue to an abstract and geometric rigor in his compass-drawn Hostinato, and multiplies the references to the arts and history, to the point of drawing on the encyclopedic universe. This protean work, marked by the exuberance of gesture, colors and formats, will be honored at the Fabre Museum from May 21 to August 28, 2022, through an exhibition and the publication of a catalog which will reveal the richness of the fund from its collections.
The Fabre Museum publishes a catalog, with a graphic charter similar to the previous catalogs by Pierrette Bloch, André Pierre Arnal, Stéphane Bordarier, a collection.