Georges Collignon (1923-2002) - Composition

Very beautiful composition dating from around 1955–1960, mixed media technique (paper collage, fabrics, gouache, ink...)
Provenance : private collection , Paris .

Georges Collignon was a Belgian painter, born August 26, 1923 in Flémalle-Haute, Belgium, and died February 5, 2002 in Liège.

In his early period, the artist of nervous and energetic art—more structured than informal, more lyrical than geometric—is fully abstract in itself. He interlaces colorful labyrinths that dance with exuberance and that recall microscopic cross-sections or aerial photographs. In the course of the 1960s, he gradually returns to a neo-figurative, unreal imagery that celebrates the union of figurative elements with abstract structures.

He studies under Auguste Mambour at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Liège from 1939 to 1945 and works at the Cristalleries du Val Saint-Lambert in Seraing.

Georges Collignon began his career as a figurative painter, trained in the academic tradition, and, during these studies—somewhat irregular—he explored surrealism and the work of René Magritte. From this period only a very few works remain, lost, some having been exhibited at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Liège in 1940, notably Champ de blé and Bosquet, temps gris. He then moved toward non-figurative painting.

After these beginnings, he conducts color research and paints his first abstract canvases as early as 1945. He participates in the activities of the Apport group and becomes a member of the Jeune Peinture Belge from 1946.

First period: Abstract art: 1946-1967
Collignon participated in the Cobra movement, and in 1950, he and Pol Bury founded the group Réalité-Cobra, the first Belgian group dedicated to defending abstract art.

He shares with Pierre Alechinsky and Jean Dubosq the Young Belgian Painting Prize, awarded for the first time in 1950.

Recipient of a French government scholarship, he settled in Paris in 1951 and stayed there until 1968. He was a founding member of the Abstract Art Group in 1952 and won the Hélène Jacquet Prize.

At first, small spots of bright colors juxtapose themselves and cover the entire surface of the canvas without aiming to create an obvious structure. But gradually, as in the works of Estève and his friend Magnelli, they widen and arrange themselves along lines of force, for the sake of vigorous rhythms, of curvilinear movements, of galactic whirlwinds that energize space into refined partitions.

The flat areas, executed with nervous and lively brushwork, render the pictorial surface intense and vibrant. Long diagonal curves cut across and cross each other as they traverse the canvas. Collignon creates a “topographic” painting in works that seem inspired by aerial views of gardens, of fields that bloom, of interchanges, of roads that cross.

He participates in the E.G.A.U. architecture group and creates some bas-reliefs or concrete integrations for the University of Liège (Belgium) at Sart-Timan, where the buildings of the Droixhe plain (Liège, Belgium) are located.

As early as 1958, he took up paper-and-fabric collages, made in the manner of Cubist papiers collés.

He wins one of the Marzotto prizes in 1960. In 1961, he exhibited at the Salon de Mai and at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles.

From 1964 onward, more and more figurative elements appear in his work, integrating with the abstract forms that gradually fade away.

Contribute actively to making Liège (Belgium) a city open to the most contemporary art through the activities of A.P.I.A.W.

Second period: Neo-figuration: 1968-2002
Participate in the Belgian pavilion at the XXXVe Venice Biennale.

Her neo-figurative work, not unrelated to Pop Art, has an offbeat sense of humor, blending objects and bodies, reality and abstraction. In chromatic mosaics, gold and silver leaf create profane icons.

If the artist's pictorial approach has a Janus-like profile, the abstract and the figurative share a single irrepressible impulse, a prodigious ardor in an explosion of colors and curvilinear rhythms.

Georges Collignon died in Liège in 2002.

In 2005, the Lions Club Liège Val Mosan established, in memory of its former member, the Georges Collignon Biennial Prize.

Citations:
My visual and formal vocabulary may have evolved once I was able to dispense with those great elders (Klee, Magnelli, Léger and Bonnard), but I would add that Magnelli, with his intellectual rigor, taught me a great deal.
I have no real conception of abstraction, except to recall Maurice Denis's definition of painting—"a picture is a flat surface covered with colors in a certain order assembled"—and that still seems relevant today. When I discovered abstract painting in 1945-1946, after the dark period of the occupation, it was a true illumination and an obligatory passage, enriching. Conversions were numerous; it was almost a religion, quickly dogmatic and intolerant. In 1967, I rediscovered figuration; that is not held in high regard, nor tolerated. One does not commit the crime of heresy, of affront to abstraction, with impunity by the orthodox, conformist, conventional of the well-meaning art world. Also, today, as yesterday, against all aesthetic racism, I claim the right to difference. One advances only by changing, as is well known.

Museography:
Belgian state
French Community of Belgium – Brussels (Belgium)
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium – Museum of Modern Art – Brussels (Belgium)
Walloon Art Museum – Liège (Belgium)
Sart-Tilman Open-Air Museum (University of Liège, Belgium)
Art Museum by the Sea, abbreviated Mu.Zee – Ostend (Belgium)
Foundation for Contemporary Belgian Art – Brussels (Belgium)
National Museum of Modern Art – Paris (France)
Frauenau Glass Museum (Wolfgang Kermer Collection)
Carnegie Institute – Pittsburgh (United States)
Museum of Modern Art - São Paulo (Brazil)
Museum of Louvain-la-Neuve, UCL (Belgium)