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GÉRARD STRICHER
Gérard Stricher's artistic journey, rooted in self-taught mastery and a rich tapestry of life experiences, began to flourish in the 1970s. His transition from a successful industrial career to a full-time painter allowed him to channel his extensive travels and cultural encounters into vibrant canvases. Known for his dynamic use of color and emotive compositions, Stricher's work captures the essence of his varied landscapes and personal reflections. His art, featured in prestigious collections like the Empire Bank and the Pepsi Cola Foundation, resonates with a broad audience, showcasing a profound blend of life's inspirations and artistic dedication.
La Couleur Décomplexée
On View Thursday, September 18 – Sunday, November 9th
Opening Reception: 6 – 8 pm Thursday, September 18th, in presence of the artists
I paint with passion, to give form to what stirs me deeply—beyond reason. Nature is the wellspring of my emotions. Its colors are my breath, my inspiration, my joy, my solace, and my peace. It reconciles me with the world. It embodies both life and death—ever victorious, ever unyielding—despite humanity’s tragedies.
To create is to bring forth life. Each work is a reality that did not exist before, just as in music when a single note becomes presence. Abstraction is never pure: it transforms into existence, into a materialized impulse. Creation is birth, life, spirituality. Through it, the artist’s soul is carried forward and continues to exist. Art transcends life and death.
NEW WORK 2025
CONVULSIVE LANDSCAPES
A man possessed, Gérard Stricher starts out with elemental outlines, telluric lines of force and prodigious flows of mental lava. Then throws away the key to the codes. Van Gogh, CoBrA and the archaic powers of forgotten countries are summoned up. Brief life and insane health: between the two a fiery art triggers our affective landscape. Close-up on the originary upsurges. The old world has to be remade. Real life is already always there.
Part invisible figuration, part embodied abstraction, extreme tensions driving creative chaos offer sovereign incantations of space. Singularly plastic structures emerge. And landscapes of immensity took horizons into the far distance. Working at his primal earth-matter from within, Stricher rips the picture surface. A fiery, untamed notation of disfigurement in the salutary no man's land of precluded meaning. Shredded space of a ceaselessly hacked art.
Stricher's devastated landscapes are arrested blinding insights. The fever of the deeps pervades these explosive chromatics and visionary upheavals. Frenetic pre-world landscapes bare of all cultural landmarks sabotage the inertia of reality and take root in the throes of desire. A strange sacrificial energy. In this art of brawling and battling the sources of the picture surface exult. The veins of the earth's deep blood are its pathways to the universe.
An earth-dweller to be reckoned with, Stricher comes on with a luminously barbarous art, one exulting in a primal well-being suffused with the devouring immensity of life and barely tamed magma. He tests out the solar vigour of those vital transgressions that sweep away our lives and our voids. His painting plots a course between stark chromatic planes and unyielding structural signs, between the breathing of buried flesh and a labyrinth of unsparing signs, between stylistic monumentality and the shamanically "charged".
Here and there, though, are tiny, delicate touches imbued with infinite sensitivity. Here and there Gérard Stricher releases masses of psychic oxygen into a space spattered with carnal profundities.
— Christian Noorbergen
SELECTED AVAILABLE WORKS
IN THE WORKSHOP: VIDEO
BIOGRAPHY
Gérard: Between Two Cultures, Between Two Lights
Gérard grew up in Lorraine, a borderland where History has often imposed its back-and-forth between France and Germany. The son of teachers, and raised alongside his two sisters, he enjoyed a happy childhood in this region marked by a dual cultural belonging. There, German was sometimes imposed by the victors of war, only to yield once again to French. This historical oscillation nourished the imagination of the inhabitants, and Gérard inherited it as an inner wealth, a shared memory that runs through his creations.
From the Germanic and Nordic Expressionist tradition, he draws strength, intensity, and an irrepressible need for color. The dark landscapes, grey skies, and scarce northern light seem to have carved within him a thirst for brightness that his painting seeks to fulfill: each canvas becomes a chromatic celebration, a sublimation of the absence of sun.
But his French culture brings another breath to his work. Here, the art of living, discreet elegance, and the poetry of Impressionist landscapes open different paths. Color remains sovereign, yet it softens, flows, and unfolds in a refined abstraction, imbued with that luminous grace reminiscent of Monet’s gardens and blossoming countrysides.
Thus, Gérard’s art stands at the crossroads of two legacies. To Germanic expressive vigor responds French delicacy, and from this dialogue emerges a painting where strength and elegance find balance, where the memory of borders is transformed into a universal language: that of color and emotion.
