NEW YORK, NY.- Bienvenu Steinberg & C will present the first New York gallery exhibition of French artist Jean Degottex (1918 - 1988). Jean Degottex is regarded as one of the most rigorous and poetic figures of postwar French abstraction. Initially considered close to the movement of lyrical abstraction and endorsed by André Breton, he soon followed his own singular path, one defined by successive cycles of research that consistently pushed the boundaries of painting. From gesture to sign, from sign to writing to the ascetic purity of the line, Degottex tirelessly explored the limits of form and language, developing a minimalist practice infused with sensitivity and spiritual resonance.

His early paintings embody a meditation on presence and absence, silence and plenitude, rigor and freedom. Like his generational peer, Simon Hantaï, Degottex directly engaged the materiality of the painterly support, and he became a strong inspiration for his younger colleagues in Supports/Surfaces. In 1951, he received the prestigious Kandinsky Prize, marking him as a leading voice of abstraction in Europe. The French National Painting Prize he was awarded in 1981, confirmed the lasting significance of his contribution. Degottex took part in various international exhibitions such as: the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1953); Documenta (II), Kassel, Germany, (1959); the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN (1959); the 32nd Venice Biennale (1964); the 8th Bienal de São Paulo (1965); the National Gallery of Art Washington, DC (1968); the Grand Palais, Paris (1972, 1985); the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (1977, 1998); the Centre Pompidou (1977,1998); the Museum of the 20th Century, Vienna, Austria, 1982; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires (1987); the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2000); the Hong Kong University Museum and Art Gallery (2005); the Musée Rath, Geneva, (2011) and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, (2019).

In the last decades of his career, Degottex’s work reached a striking minimalism, marked by radical experiments with surface, gesture, and materiality. Among the most conceptually and aesthetically refined of these explorations is the Pli and Dépli series (1979–1980), in which the fold—a simple, physical action—becomes both medium and meaning. The exhibition will focus on nine paintings and a significant body of unstretched works on canvas, all from 1979-1980. The term “Pli” and "Dépli" (“Fold and Unfold”) speaks to a dual motion: the fold as an intervention, and the unfolding as a revelation. The process echoes the artist’s long-standing interest in Zen Buddhism and Eastern calligraphy, where the act of making is as important as the result. In Pli and Dépli, the fold replaces the brushstroke. Immediate and irreversible, the fold only carries presence and trace.

By reducing his technique to the most elemental manipulation of the support, Degottex challenges the hierarchy between figure and ground, image and surface. The fold is the image, and yet it is inseparable from the material it inhabits. This flattening of form and gesture prefigures the concepts later developed by Gilles Deleuze in his seminal book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque published in 1988. The fold represents a continuous becoming for Deleuze, a powerful way of thinking, that resists traditional boundaries and dualities.

The Pli and Dépli series can be seen as a culmination of Degottex’s lifelong effort to allow the work to emerge from the interaction of time, action, and material. The fold, not merely a visual motif— is a quiet but potent gesture of withdrawal and revelation, inviting contemplation and attunement. Some of the paintings in the show bear no pigment or color: they rely on the shadows, textures, and structural changes produced by the act of folding itself. Other works include lines and corners painted with a radiant blue pigment reminiscent of Matisse's late cutouts.

Degottex's work is represented in numerous international collections. In France, it can be found at the Centre Pompidou in Paris— a dedicated room in the permanent collection offered a surveys of his oeuvre— Other institutions include: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Bibliothèque nationale de France; Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence; Musée de Grenoble; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes; Musée Cantini, Marseille; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest, Musée des BeauxArts de Dijon; Musée Unterlinden in Colmar. Internationally, Degottex is present at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Liège; the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna; Malmö Konsthall in Sweden, the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Geneva; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Ōhara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan and the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan, among others.