Yvon Lambert and Ève Lambert are pleased to invite you to the exhibition
Pierrette Bloch
Papiers - Livres, estampes, encres & pastels
Opening Reception & Book Launch
Gédéon et Symagré
An unpublished text by Pierrette Bloch, edited by Sylvain Courbois in a limited edition
Tuesday, September 15 from 6 PM to 8 PM
In the presence of Sylvain Courbois and David Quéré, executor of Pierrette Bloch's estate
Exhibition from September 4 to October 4, 2026
Through a selection of books, prints, and original works, the Yvon Lambert Bookstore and Gallery is dedicating an exhibition to Pierrette Bloch (1928–2017), a leading figure in French abstract art.
The exhibition will highlight the remarkable coherence of a body of work that, over the course of seventy years of creative activity, has evolved around a single medium of experimentation: paper. As a medium for writing, drawing, printmaking, and publishing, paper serves as the common thread running through a practice in which each gesture seems to build on the previous one while opening up a new path.
An avid reader, Pierrette Bloch had a deep and enduring relationship with literature. If she hadn’t been a painter, she would sometimes say, she would have chosen to become a writer. Beginning in the early 1990s, her affinity for words took shape in short texts, which she published in numerous catalogs before they were compiled into a book titled Discours et circonstances. The exhibition presents her complete body of writing, including Mémoires d’Antoine Chantin, published posthumously. But it also marks the occasion for the publication of Gédéon et Symagré, a previously unpublished text by Pierrette Bloch, published in a limited edition by Sylvain Courbois, which naturally extends the exhibition by revealing a more intimate facet of her work—one in which her writing demonstrates the same economy of means and the same intensity as her visual art.
This focus on books is reflected in the presentation of three major silkscreen prints. Although printmaking occupies a modest place in Pierrette Bloch’s body of work, it has nevertheless been a constant throughout her career, from her earliest experiments in the early 1950s to her very last work, a large-scale aquatint, in 2017. Created at different points in her life, the prints on display reflect a constant exploration of rhythm, repetition, density, and emptiness.
Finally, the exhibition features several original works on paper: they illustrate a particularly fruitful period in her career, when, after having brought certain lines of research to their highest level of achievement, Pierrette Bloch chose to reexamine her own visual language. By subtly altering her media, tools, and techniques, she opened a new chapter in her work, remaining true to an approach that seems to follow an overriding principle: to repeat but never repeat oneself.
Bringing together books, prints, and works on paper, this exhibition invites visitors to explore Pierrette Bloch’s world through three expressions of a single creative vision. It reveals an artist who, far from settling into a set formula, has continually questioned her work with a freedom and rigor that define the uniqueness of her body of work.
ABOUT PIERRETTE BLOCH
Born in 1928 in Paris, Pierrette Bloch is one of the leading figures of postwar French abstraction. Trained under André Lhote, she developed a deeply personal artistic language at an early stage, based on the repetition of gestures, restraint, and economy of means.
For seven decades, she has tirelessly explored the possibilities of paper, ink, horsehair, rope, and printmaking, creating a deeply abstract body of work in which rhythm, time, and space play an essential role.
Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at leading institutions, including Musée de Grenoble, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museum Pfatzgalerie Kaiserslautern, Musée Jenisch in Vevey, and Musée Fabre in Montpellier, as well as a major retrospective at Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole in 2025.
Her works are now part of the collections of the world’s leading museums, including Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, MoMA and the MET in New York, Mamco in Geneva, and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
