Serge Poliakoff Biography
Serge Poliakoff was born on January 8, 1900 in Moscow.
He started taking drawing lessons at the age of 14. He settled in Paris in 1923 and began studying painting in 1929. His teacher, Othon Friesz, a former Fauve, influenced Poliakoff's interest in saturated color. He organized his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Zak in Paris in 1937. He exhibited his first abstract work in 1938 at his first Salon des Indépendants. In 1945, the L'Esquisse gallery in Paris presented a solo exhibition of his work. He is considered a member of the "new" École de Paris after World War II.
His paintings invest in the asymmetrical and expressive qualities associated with lyrical abstraction, Art informel, Art autre (Art of another kind), and, perhaps most often, Tachisme (from the French “tâche,” for “blot” ). He produced works that focused on overlapping colors held in linear shapes on the canvas, with shading mediated by texture and tempered by his experiments with monochrome painting between 1947 and 1950. In his mature paintings he contrasted rich, almost jewel-like colors before return to more sober tones in the 1960s. After a heart attack in 1965, he began working on smaller format canvases and lithographs.
Solo exhibitions were held at the Circle and Square Gallery in New York (1952) and the Palais des beaux-arts in Brussels (1953). A room in the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was dedicated to his work (1962). The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London organized his first major retrospective (1963) and his work was included in the Tokyo Biennial (1965). Other important retrospectives were presented at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland (1966), the Tel Aviv Museum (1971-72), the Musée Fabre in Montpellier in France (1974) and the Lorenzelli Arte in Milan (1978).
Poliakoff died on October 12, 1969 in Paris.