Vicky Colombet is a French-born American visual Artist. She lives in New York and Paris.
Life
Born in Paris in 1953, Vicky Colombet grew up in Paris in a family that was artistic and intellectual on her father’s side and nomadic on her mother’s side. Her mother’s search for her ancestry led the family to travel often to Asia. The exposure to Asian Culture at an early age, has been a major influence. An avid reader of poetry and philosophy Colombet began as a writer and wrote two essays in Les Temps Modernes “Les Femmes s’entêtent" Involved in the Feminist movement in Paris, she met Simone de Beauvoir in 1974 and co-founded with her, and :fr:Anne_Zelensky|Anne Zelensky, Annie Sugier and Annie Cohen “La Ligue du Droit des Femmes”. Vicky Colombet started a newspaper “Les Nouvelles Féministes” with Simone de Beauvoir as the Editor-in-chief. The writer Christiane Rochefort who became a close friend encouraged her to pursue an artistic career. The painter Henri Dimier who was an iconoclast with an Asian approach to the practice of art became her mentor. And later, having the opportunity to meet with Agnes Martin in the last years of her life, Colombet was influenced by Martin’s rigor and her withdrawal from the world.
Work
In 2001, Colombet moved to America and became a U.S. citizen in 2013. In many of her paintings and drawings, as well as in her major architectural work the sandblasted curved of , several elements merge to manifest the dynamic flux of the universe. "Breathing" is the character Colombet looks for in a work. Colombet never stopped drawing, as a vital exercise of hand and mind and as a record like notes for the fiction she would unfold on canvas. Each of Colombet's paintings is the result of a long process that starts with the choice of the linen she handpicks in Spain or France. Colombet makes her own primer and grinds her own pigments. "Her paintings… work both as pure abstraction and as studies of nature. They can manage to seem resolutely nonobjective while conveying the weight of a study of mountains or stone. In fact, her philosophy of form can be said to occupy a point where abstraction and nature meet. Colombet’s singular vision juggles the opposition of representation and abstraction. The notable intelligence of her art is, indeed, based upon an objective, nearly scholarly research into the relations between the two. Vicky Colombet extends our knowledge of art’s ability to communicate effects that are inherently mysterious but truly compelling as things to see.”
