André Brasilier’s life on canvas has spanned over sixty years; acareer that began in the 1950s at the École des Beaux-Arts and has since included major retrospective exhibitions in France, Japan, and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. With a prolific oeuvre and a style eluding classification, Brasilier is among France’s most important and distinguished living contemporary artists. The exhibition illustrates the artist’s most notable themes as a wanderer and observer of life’s subtle simplicities. Set against quintessentially romantic backgrounds, Brasilier’s paintings reflect the contemplative self-awareness that renders his work universally accessible and fundamentally humanist. Born into an artistic family in Samur, France in 1929, Brasilier’s father, Jacques Brasilier, was closely affiliated with the Symbolist movement, joining the atelier of the celebrated Mucha; his mother, Alice Chaumont, was a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London. Brasilier possessed a natural inclination for painting at an early age, and at the age of twenty went to Paris to study at the École de Beaux-Arts. In 1952 he received a grant from the Florence Blumenthal Foundation, and in the following year, when he was only 23, won the Premier Grand Prix de Rome, entitling him to study at the Académie de France in Rome. His first solo exhibition of paintings, focusing on the musical themes that often appear in his works, was held at the Galerie Drouet in 1959. He was a frequent participant in gallery exhibition in Paris throughout the 1950s and 60s. Over the years Brasilier has exhibited in numerous exhibitions all over the world including France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, United States, Russia, The Netherlands, Korea and Hong Kong – over one hundred solo exhibitions in eleven different countries. His travels have inspired several series of paintings, as well as ceramics mosaics, theatrical sets and book illustrations that have peppered his illustrious career. He had his first retrospective of one hundred artworks from 1950-1980 at the Château de Chenonceau in 1980 and a retrospective exhibition at the Musée Picasso-Château Grimaldi in Antibes, the French Riviera, in 1988. He has since been honoured with major retrospectives both at Russia’s renowned State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg in 2005 and at the Museum Haus Ludwig für Kunstausstellungen Saarlois in Germany in 2007.