In a career spanning eight decades, Françoise Gilot created a body of work marked by artistic freedom and experimentation. Including paintings made between 1958 and 2004, the exhibition looks at the breadth of Gilot’s practice as she shifted between representation and pure abstraction. Often depicting her own daily life in her works, Gilot incorporated symbolic elements and a consistent exploration of color. Works such as Dog Days II, 1992, translate the experience of a scorching summer day into vivid fields of red, while similar geometric forms lend themselves to pure abstraction in Convergences, 1997.

Born in 1921 outside of Paris, Françoise Gilot initially trained as a lawyer before leaving to pursue a career as an artist in the early 1940s. While often overshadowed by her relationship with Pablo Picasso, whom she first met in 1943, Gilot’s work remained innovative after their relationship’s end in 1953. She would continue to paint until her death in 2023, combining Cubist and other Modernist strategies with contemporary aesthetics. In 1970, Gilot married the American scientist Jonas Salk, and would subsequently establish a studio in California, where she created “floating paintings” — monumental canvases which hang suspended in space. Following Salk’s death in 1995, Gilot would work between New York and Paris, returning to pure abstraction in lyrical compositions. Gilot’s work was exhibited widely during her lifetime, including a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 1992. Her work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée Picasso, Antibes; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. A permanent exhibition of Gilot’s paintings is on view at the Musée Picasso, Paris.