2001-2015 Abstraction

During the years following the Comets series, Gilot explores abstractions with strong tout diagonal reaching out like explosions about to happen. Unhindered, the painter becomes a vector to cut us loose from the world of reality.

Figurative works are at the razor’s edge between abstraction and figuration. How many elements are needed to imply a subject without becoming descriptive and redundant. Those works evoke places of emotions for the artist: Central Park in New York, Budapest, or the standing stones of Carnac in Britany, France where she went as a child. Also, from her readings as a teenager, a series on The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder treats the subject of death with a sarcastic irreverence. As she approaches the respectable age of 100, some introspection perhaps, but with a bang.

Meanwhile, many, many exhibitions. In 2003 the show at the Kunstsammlungen, Chemnitz, Germany, Françoise Gilot Painting - Malerei, a major retrospective of nonfigurative works. Curated by Ingrid Mössinger, the museum director, the exhibition wins Germany’s best museum exhibition of the year. They exhibit her graphic works in 2011.

Exhibit by John Richardson Picasso and Françoise Gilot Paris-Vallauris, 1943-1953, at the Gagosian Gallery, New York. The catalogue written by Richardson, features texts by Gilot.

In 2004, she publishes Dans L’Arène avec Picasso, by Françoise Gilot and Annie Maïllis at the Éditions Indigène.

In 2015, she publishes About Women: Conversations between a Writer and a Painter with co-author Lisa Alther at Doubleday. They compare experiencing the cultural codes and being a woman growing up, one in France between the two World Wars and the other in Tennessee in the fifties. The contrast makes both and any code look idiosyncratic.