Claire Tabouret

Based in Los Angeles, Claire Tabouret is a contemporary French artist known for her enigmatic figurative language. Layered with fluid colour, texture and half-told stories, her paintings are suspended in dreamlike worlds, often exploring themes of youth, memory and identity.

Tabouret was born in Pertuis, France in 1981. She recalls visiting the Musée de l’Orangerie as a child, where she was entranced by Claude Monet’s Nymphéas. Much of her approach, including her deft handling of light and profound sensitivity to chromatic nuance, may be traced to this formative encounter. Tabouret went on to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, before setting up a studio in Los Angeles in 2015.

Tabouret often works from archival photographs and other printed source material. Her subjects, however, appear divorced from time and place. The artist frequently uses washes of fluorescent colour below the surface of her paintings, illuminating them from within. Elsewhere her palette is dark and earthy, flickering with faded light. Echoes of art history — from Edouard Manet and Edvard Munch to Alex Katz — linger in the shadows.

Tabouret is particularly celebrated for her group portraits, which interrogate the subtle frictions between collective and individual identity. Works from her series Les débutantes, inspired by photographs of young women attending debutante balls, have achieved some of her top prices at auction. Her oeuvre also includes landscapes and self-portraits, as well as drawing, sculpture and monotype prints.

Since coming to prominence in the early 2010s, Tabouret has risen to critical acclaim. In 2017 she exhibited alongside Yoko Ono at the Villa Medici, Rome, and subsequently mounted solo shows at institutions including the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, the Musée Picasso, Paris and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Her solo exhibition I am spacious, singing flesh was presented at the Palazzo Cavanis, Venice during the 2022 Venice Biennale. Elsewhere, she has collaborated with fashion brands including Dior and UGG.