Claude Garache 1929 -
Claude Garache was born in Paris on 20 January 1929 or in 1930. Between his twenties and thirties, he studied sculpture and drawing under the sculptor Robert Coutin. Here he learnt the significance of the human form which would later be translated in his preoccupation with the female nude. In the 50s, Garache spent time in the studios of Cubist Andre Lhote and revered artist, Fernand Léger. Garache also visited Alberto Giacometti and worked in the sculpture studio of the prestigious Parisian art school ‘Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts’. Garache was first recommended to Aimé Maeght, the most important art-dealer in post-war France, by two of Maeght’s most important artists, Joan Miró and Marc Chagall.
Although Garache’s subject is exclusively the female body, the Surrealist Raoul Ubac and the Post-War School of Paris abstract-artist Pierre Courtin have written prefaces to Garache’s exhibition catalogues. He travelled frequently in the 1950s, in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. In 1955 he worked as an artistic advisor to American director, Vincente Minnelli, during the filming of ‘Lust for Life’, a biography of Vincent Van Gogh. Garache continued his career and focused on sculptures.
'My women are genderless. They are human beings, they represent all people.'
As a painter, Garache is a perfectionist, layering on wash after wash of color, building up depth and intensity, establishing both a ground and an almost 3-dimensional shape looming out of that ground. Garache is an established master of the aquatint, whose graphics are regularly included in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s five-year surveys of the most important work in prints and were similarly included in shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Fifth European Print Bienniale, and have been featured in one-person shows at museums and galleries in the U.S., Belgium, England, France, Germany, and Spain.
He is also a superb lithographer, whose sense of colour and texture produces fascinating and compelling studies of the human figure, his only subject.
Slade House collects and owns original lithographs, giclees and limited edition prints by all of the artists represented here - only some of which are for sale online. Please get in touch if you would like to see our wider collection.
