Fabienne Verdier
1962– · French abstract painter trained in China
Fabienne Verdier (born 1962 in Paris) is a French painter who spent years studying and working in China, an unusual path for a Western artist. In 1985 she went to Chongqing to study at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, where she became the first non-Chinese woman to receive a post-graduate diploma in fine arts from the institute.
During her time there she worked alongside some of the last major Chinese painters to have survived the Cultural Revolution, learning from them their approach to spontaneous painting. From this training she gradually developed her own abstract work, organised around successive research phases on the forces of nature, the instantaneous and constant movement. Notable projects include twenty-two works created for the Le Petit Robert dictionary, the Walking-Paintings series of 2012 and a 13-metre painting in the Tour Majunga at La Défense. In 2014 Hong Kong staged her first retrospective.
Her book Passagère du Silence, published in 2003 about her apprenticeship in China, won several prizes. Her work remains a distinctive bridge between European abstraction and Chinese tradition.