Odilon Redon

Exhibited by Marianne Boesky Gallery

Material Pastel on paper

Dimensions 49 × 49 cm

Price Available upon inquiry

Status Vetted

About the Work

In the 1890s, Odilon Redon—who was then best known for surreal, black-and-white lithographs—began to incorporate color into his palette. An “exquisite and unforgettable painter of flowers,” Redon conjured fantastical bouquets amidst undefined, atmospheric space, mythic and religious narratives in dreamy, floral landscapes, and ships adrift on colorful, uncertain seas. Neither realism nor naturalism were of any particular interest to Redon; rather, he borrowed elements of the natural world, carefully wielded them to capture the dreamlike quality and emotional depth of the particular fantasies for which he became famed. “Instead of choosing between imagination and mimesis, fantasy and nature,” curator Jodi Hauptman writes, “Redon deployed one to get to the other: he closely examined nature in inventing fantasies, he carefully observed reality as a way to take flights of the imagination.” While Redon associated—at various points throughout his career—with the Post-Impressionists, Symbolists, and Nabis, he never truly belonged to any singular movement. His work, instead, remained deeply personal, rooted in memory and imagination; he rendered flowers in loose, easy brushstrokes not to capture the natural world, but to capture fleeting memories and ephemeral sensations.

Redon once remarked that his work emerged from “the confluence of two riverbanks, that of representation and that of memory.” It is an apt account, too, of Thalita Hamaoui’s work, which is presented alongside Redon's at TEFAF Maastricht 2026. Reveling in the boundless, fantastical possibilities found at the junction of these dual riverbanks, Redon and Hamaoui draw from their experience of the natural world—but make no qualms about abandoning reality in search of an emotional truth. “This is the unique trail that Redon blazed,” Hauptman writes, “a notion of vision that encompasses both the ability to observe and the capacity to experience the mystical or the supernatural: the combination of the real and the fantastic.” The result, for both Hamaoui and Redon, is a mirage—a moment, a memory, a myth—suspended forever in paint.

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Provenance

Robert de Domecy, France
Galerie Hopkins-Thomas, Paris
Private collection, Japan

Literature

Wildenstein, Alec. Odilon Redon: Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint et dessiné, vol. III, Fleurs et paysages. Paris: Wildenstein Institute and La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1996, p. 81, no. 1466 (reproduced in black and white, p. 82).