François Morellet
(b.1926)
François Morellet was born in 1926 in Cholet, France. He was a selftaught artist and turned to geometric abstraction in 1950, exhibiting in the same year at Galerie Creuze, Paris; his first solo exhibition. Influenced by the simplicity of Mondrian’s visual language, Morellet’s work followed a strongly applied system. His paintings would be subdivided by horizontal and vertical lines either painted or in wire lattice. Morellet was more interested in the method than in the outcome, reducing the artists subjectivity to the minimum. He was a founder member of the group GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), established in Paris in 1960, a group of experimental Kinetic artists. In 1963 he began using neon tubes which emitted luminous rhythms, to investigate the relationship between perception and the environment. Morellet exhibited with GRAV in numerous exhibitions, including The Responsive Eye, Musuem of Modern Art, New York, 1965. A retrospective of his work was held at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris in 1986.