James Coignard, 1925-2008.

BIOGRAFI:
1926-1944 Växer upp i Paris
1948 Studerar vid "Ecole des Arts Décoratifs" i Nice
1950 Tilldelad första pris "Hors Concours" vid Arts Décoratifs
Första samarbetet med Hervieu Gallery, Nice
1952 Startar keramik-workshop i Paris
Första utställningen i Skandinavien
1957 Flyttar till Franska Rivieran
Nära kontakt med konstnärer vid "Ecole de Nice": Atlan, C Boumeester, H Goetz, M Papart
1961 Skapar glasskulpturer för "La fuccina degli angeli", Venedig (Peggy Guggenheim Collection)
1963 Första utställningen i New York, USA
1966 Amerikanska museum gör sina första inköp av hans verk
1968 Utför sina första carborundum-gravyrer
1969 Påbörjar regelbundna utställningar av sina verk internationellt
1975 Skapar en serie tapestries in Brno, Czechoslovakia
1977 Gör sina första bronsskulpturer
1982 Grundar studio i Paris
1983 Tillverkar en stor panel för the Rothschild Foundation i Nice
1985 Lämnar Paris och installerar studio i New Orleans, USA
1987 Skapar stor triptych för Sonet Studios, Stockholm
1988 Återvänder till Frankrike och slår sig ner nära Paris

With just a few strokes of his brush he conjures up an entire world. James Coignard extends the boundaries between concrete and abstract. He knows how to create chromatic melodies that shift in timbre from cobalt blue to blood red, from earthy tones to blocks of colour as black as night. His paintings embrace everything from vast expanses of colour to spaces enclosed. His pictures are an artistic epicentre where lines, letters and numbers meld with vigorous swashes of colour. Born in Tours in 1925, James Coignard moved to Paris with his parents at the age of three. Even as a child he had an insatiable appetite for drawing and painting. In 1948, 23 years old, he made up his mind to become an artist and enrolled at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Nice. The following year he and his fellow artist, Marchand des Raux, staged a joint exhibition at the Musée de l'Ile de France in St Jean Cap Ferrat. Around the same time Coignard came into contact with the great Henri Matisse and was influenced by his work for a while before he began to seek his own ways forward. Not long afterwards Coignard discovered the modernists’ handling of colour via the techniques of Georges Braque and Marc Chagall. His contact in the late 1950s with a number of Spanish artists and his special fascination for Catalan sculptures and frescoes proved decisive for his artistic development. Coignard’s first Paris exhibition came in 1960. Since then he has exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, and is well represented in both private and public collections that include the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, California. In the late 1960s Coignard produced his first etchings in the gravure au carborundum technique. Earlier in the same decade he had also begun to create sculptures in bronze and glass, which he has continued to produce parallel with his paintings and graphic work. Today he is based in the south of France, with a studio in Antibes and a home on the outskirts of Cannes. James Coignard’s paintings and graphic works are an artistic adventure, an aesthetic game in which the destructive and the momentous mingle freely with the spontaneous and the sensual.