Large canvas-backed poster by Robert Combas, Paris, France, 1986

Large canvas-backed poster by Robert Combas, signed and dated 1986, in six strips.
Poster project for the association “La Porte Ouverte”, to be displayed in the Paris subway system.
Width: 320 cm (126 inches - 10.5 feet)
Height: 255 cm (100.4 inches - 8.4 feet)

Biography

Robert Combas was born in Lyon in 1957.

He spent his childhood and adolescence in Sète. Robert Combas’ work, discovered by the public on the occasion of the exhibition at the Musée de Saint-Étienne, « Après le classicisme », created a great surprise in France. In a context of domination of conceptual art and a return to figuration at the end of the 70s, influenced by Rock and Roll, comics, graphic arts and the North African signs that he saw in Sète, Robert Combas invented a complex iconography that puts, on the same level, high culture and popular culture. He uses recycled materials and cardboard as supports for expressionist paintings that he develops, drawing inspiration in particular from his teenage drawings.

He settled in Paris in 1981. His work was then presented by the art critic Bernard Lamarche-Vade on the occasion of the exhibition « Finir en beauté », associated with the works of Hervé di Rosa, Rémy Blanchard and François Boisrond. These four artists constitute what was called by Ben La Figuration Libre. Institutionalized by critics, this concept is used to define a spontaneous, very colorful figurative painting, with a relaxed execution. However, this name does not cover the diversity and complexity of Robert Combas’ work, which he would develop from this first media recognition in the early 80s.

Robert Combas’ work is expressed through a multiplicity of themes that cross society: love, sex, death, mythology, the lives of the Saints… a subject addressed in depth on the occasion of two exhibitions in 1991: The Bible at the Beaubourg gallery and The Saints at the Yvon Lambert Gallery (Robert Combas and the sacred). Robert Combas was and remains incontestably the outstanding personality of this group of Free Figuration. The extraordinary imbrication of the figures one within the other, the way in which each interstice is an opportunity for the artist to invent a new plastic solution, testify to the great mastery of the painter who associates the desire to measure himself against the history of art experienced as a legend, and to introduce the vocabulary of popular culture such as references to great painters or television soap operas without establishing a hierarchy between these domains. The works are often accompanied by written titles, whose inventiveness has an undeniable poetic and humorous force.

Robert Combas’ work has been shown by several French and European museums (Amsterdam, Groningen, CAPC in Bordeaux, Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, Seoul Museum of Art in Korea, Manufacture des Gobelins, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon (retrospective in 2012), the Carré Saint-Anne in Montpellier in 2014 with the exhibition La mélancolie à printemps which offers a dialogue between the artist’s works and the neo-Gothic church and its stained glass windows, La Collection Lambert in Avignon in 2016 and the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco the same year, etc.). Numerous editions and monographs have been published on his work.

For more information, visit the artist’s official website.