After establishing herself on the international scene, the 43-year-old French painter was selected by the Élysée and the archbishopric of Paris on Wednesday to create six large bays in the southern chapels of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral.
Only eight finalists remained candidates to design six large bays in the south chapels of Notre-Dame after a call for applications was launched in April, to which 110 teams applied. Claire Tabouret, a 43-year-old French artist, exhibiting her works around the world, was chosen on Wednesday for this colossal and contested project. According to the Élysée, « his work has been acquired by large collections and important museums, both in France and in the United States and China ».
The petite, lively, serious young woman, who studied at the Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2006, has become a star of contemporary painting for which major gallery owners and their collectors compete. From the Yuz Museum by Budi Tek, in Shanghai, to the Villa Medici in Rome, from the Agnès b. Collection, in Paris, to the Pinault Collection in Venice and Paris, she has already had all the honors. Based offshore in Los Angeles since 2015, she has anchored her very European world, with a latent and melancholic power that is recognizable at first glance. She set up her 600 square meter workshops in a former industrial space in the Pico-Union district. « My enjoyment of Los Angeles is being a little removed from a lot of things. And so, more in my painting », she explains at the time of confinement in 2021.
In 2013, François Pinault stopped in front of his large ghostly paintings at the Isabelle Gounod gallery. Love at first sight of the public then in his Palazzo Grassi in Venice, where The Watchers (2007) was shown for the first time by the Pinault Collection in 2014, during the exhibition The Illusion of Enlightenment. In 2018, the Lambert Collection in Avignon is exhibiting its cold ceramics and hallucinatory paintings. Pale children drowned in The Great Camisole2014, menacing or threatened children who combine the tradition of carnival with their costumes and brandish spears like the horsemen of The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello (circa 1456) in The Watchers2014 (230 × 400 cm).
Dior entrusted him with his favorite bag in 2020, Lady Dior, presented in majesty at Msheireb Downtown Doha in Qatar, along with all the others Lady Dior Art In Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams. The following year, his self-portrait with a fluorescent edge, Claire Tabouret, Self portrait at the Table2020, inaugurates the Bourse de Commerce.
Exhibited at the Picasso Museum
Paris celebrated her three times for her 40th birthday. The Picasso Museum welcomed its bronze fountain, the artist’s first, inspired by Three women at the fountain by Picasso, a flagship work in the collection of the Musée national Picasso-Paris. Almine Rech, who represents her in Paris, exhibits in her gallery Urgency and Patiencea series of self-portraits and group paintings, and her sculptures of mermaids that resemble her. Emmanuel Perrotin, who represents it in Asia, exhibits at the same time Interior landscapes, its large formats painted on colored synthetic fur, both wild and surprisingly sensual. In 2023, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Miami presents its exhibition At the Bois d’Amourin which the painter continues to venture into paintings on synthetic fur.
According to the press release published Wednesday by the Élysée, the project proposed by Claire Tabouret « lives up to what the cathedral demands, both through the very high artistic quality of the proposal and its architectural insertion – particularly its adequacy with the stained glass window representing the tree of Jesse (1864), present in one of the chapels on the same aisle of the nave, which will remain in place – only by respecting the figurative program chosen by the diocese of Paris relating to Pentecost. »
The artist, who recently announced his return to Paris, will create the new contemporary stained glass windows of Notre-Dame, planned for the end of 2026, with the workshops of master glassmaker Simon-Marq. Founded almost 400 years ago, these Reims workshops have to their credit numerous creations of religious stained glass, including the large bay by Imi Knoebel in Reims Cathedral.
His appointment, however, risks relaunching a wave of protest from opponents of the project, the original stained glass windows concerned having not been damaged by the fire. A petition, launched against these contemporary stained glass windows by the owner of the site The Art TribuneDidier Rykner, has collected nearly 245,000 signatures to date.
