About this Event
Giverny on Hudson continues the dialogue begun in 2020–2021 at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris: Monet/Colombet. Painting Like the River. This new exhibition traces the trajectory of the French-American artist.
Born in Paris in 1953, Vicky Colombet moved to the United States in 2001. She has since lived and worked between the Hudson Valley, New York, and Paris.
The exhibition presents several paintings, including two from the Sun series that refer to the dialogue with Monet, which have gradually become a continuous conversation across time.
For Monet, it is not simply his way of painting light, but his understanding that light changes from one moment to the next; it transforms what we see and, perhaps, the way we see. In the Sun series, Colombet seeks less to depict an image of the sun than to make us experience the sensation of light appearing and disappearing.
The exhibition also presents a new series, Quantum Gold Fields, in which gold pigment is an integral element of the surface. Colombet uses it for its particular relationship to light. It does not merely represent luminosity; it receives and reflects the actual light of the surrounding space. As the viewer moves, as daylight shifts or the atmosphere of a room changes, the gold can suddenly become luminous, then vanish again. The painting is never quite the same each time one looks at it. A quest for the undecidable.
The exhibition also places in dialogue an older series, Antarctica, begun in 2014 and devoted to the melting of glaciers, initially worked with a bluish cobalt green pigment. The new paintings extend this series through the use of silver pigment. The reflective quality of the pigment acts like a particle, moving with the light and continually redefining the landscape, to create a perceptual experience in constant transformation.
Giverny on Hudson brings together within a single continuum the recollection of landscapes of water and light, not to represent them directly, but to bring forth a state, a sensation, a vibration.
Artist Statement
Vicky Colombet's abstract paintings are deeply infused with Asian philosophy. It constitutes an essential component of her conception of the world. Shaped by a childhood spent traveling in Southeast Asia and India, with her parents, in a quest of her mother's Asian origins. Buddhist thought on mindfulness, transcendentalism, and research in contemporary physics are constant sources of inspiration.
These various lines of thought meet in her practice and find their materialization in the use of pure pigment. Colombet thus develops "landscape-canvases," in which the canvas becomes a space of sedimentation, resonating with the forces and movements of nature. The disappearance of the trace of the artist's gesture allows a nature in itself to emerge, a pictorial space that might be described as "painting-nature," and in that continuity a search for a "becoming nature."
Thus, Colombet's paintings therefore do not depict a particular landscape, they construct the idea of it. They function as visual catalysts, inviting an inner experience of place and time. They translate a sensitive relationship to the world and invite contemplation. Her works thus evoke mental and meditative landscapes.
Pictured: Quantum Gold Fields #1642, 2026
Pigment, oil alkyd on canvas
66 x 62 in.; courtesy of the artist
Event venue & nearby stays
La Maison Française NYU, 16 Washington Mews, New York, United States
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