Fabienne Verdier, Alchimie du vitrail, Musée Camille Claudel

French artist Fabienne Verdier trained in painting with Chinese masters in the 1980s. After a ten-year apprenticeship in China, she returned to France and invented her own pictorial language. On huge colored canvases, she searches for the energy and vibration of signs and simple forms, traced with brushes and custom-made tools that engage her whole body. Her paintings are now part of the collections of the most prestigious museums and her work is regularly exhibited in many countries.

In the spring of 2022, the painter Fabienne Verdier returns to Nogent-sur-Seine for an exhibition at the Camille Claudel Museum. In 2016, she had already created the stained glass windows of the choir of the Saint-Laurent church in collaboration with Flavie Serrière-Vincent-Petit, a master glass artist based in Troyes.

At the Camille Claudel Museum, the exhibition will give a central place to the stained glass windows of the Saint-Laurent church and to the reflection of the two artists. Their experiments will form the heart of the exhibition through a set of glassmaker’s tools, films and photographs showing the realization of the stained glass windows in order to reveal to the public the backstage of this original collaboration. An original variant of the stained glass windows, not chosen for the choir of the church, will be presented exceptionally in the former sculpture gallery in the park of the former Dubois-Boucher museum.

The contemporary aesthetics of the stained glass windows will be illuminated by a set of paintings by Fabienne Verdier, showing the bridges that exist between her pictorial practice and the reflection that she has carried out since the commission for the stained glass windows of the church of Nogent-sur-Seine. In line with this work, Fabienne Verdier and Flavie Serrière-Vincent-Petit have also created a series of paintings on glass, Topographies imaginaires, which will be exhibited for the first time to the public. It will be displayed in the museum’s superb auditorium with its panoramic view of the city.