Viallat (Claude)

Claude Viallat was born in Nîmes in 1936 in a protestant family and was brought up in a small village in the Gard, Aubais, rich from a bull-fighting tradition. He went to the Beaux-Arts of Nîmes where he meets a few of the artists he will work with later and create the movement “Supports/Surfaces”. The founding exhibition took place in 1969 at the Musée d’art modern de la ville de Paris. Claude Viallat’s style is sustainable: it is characterized by a repetitive marking system, that has a “random” form. His first exhibition in a museum took place at Saint-Etienne in 1974. In 19802, he is discovered by a larger audience thanks to the CAPC of Bordeaux, then two years later with the “Grande retrospective” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Viallat was a teacher for a long time in various art schools in province, then in Paris. There is not a year when one of his works isn’t exhibited. The past few years, he exhibited at the Musée Matisse de Cateau-Cambrésis, Clermont-ferrand, Bergma,e Céret, Toulouon and Perpignan, the Villeneuve castle in Vence, Biarritz, Nîmes, Castries, Colmar, Hégenhem in Perthus, Pont du Gard…