1910 Tourcoing/France – 2000 Wasquehal/France

Eugène Leroy experiences a variety of artistic trends until his late death. He is a contemporary of Malevich, Duchamp, Picasso, Pollock, Freud and Baselitz. In 1931 he began his artistic training at the École des Beaux-Arts of Lille and Paris, but finds himself mainly self-taught to his specific painting. The result is an oeuvre whose motives are neither resolved in perfect non-objectivity nor are they concretely recognizable. Leroy cares little about the much-discussed ideological separation of figuration and abstraction. The modeled layers of color complete on closer inspection to a figure, a face or a landscape. Leroy is today one of the most renowned French painters of the 20th century and is represented in many important public collections worldwide. With a first major museum exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the painter only received due recognition in his homeland from 1988 onwards. In Germany, however, his talent was recognized much earlier and also in New York, Amsterdam and Ghent Leroy previously exhibited.