EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Vicky Colombet
French-born, American visual artist Vicky Colombet (b. 1953) works and lives between New York, Upstate New York and Paris.
Raised in Paris, Colombet whose mother was of Asian descent spent her childhood traveling extensively with her parents across Southeast Asia and India. Eastern thinking became an important part of Colombet’s perception of the world.
Colombet studied law at the Sorbonne and began her career as a graphic designer and writer before being invited to study in the Paris atelier of Henri Dimier (1899-1986). They shared an interest in the metaphysical beliefs in what lies beyond, underlies or transcends the physical nature of the world and reality.
With a career spanning over three decades, Vicky Colombet’s abstract paintings, works on paper, prints, fine art photography, and architectural glass projects exist in conversation with various art historical movements—from traditional Chinese Painting to Abstract Expressionism.
"Vicky Colombet’s paintings work both as pure abstraction and as studies of nature. Her philosophy of form can be said to occupy a point where abstraction and nature meet. By using the reductive and repetitive aspects of Minimalist thinking, her images strip themselves of all formal elements. While Colombet questions what can be read as landscape, her surfaces capture a fleeting moment in the life of nature and evoke contemplation. “Colombet, who makes her own colors using natural gem and earth pigments, is working out a language that owes its power to nature and the sublime." Jonathan Goodman, artcritical, December 2014.
“These paintings — and this is perhaps true of all good and great paintings — are apprehended at different tempos, from the immediate impression to a longer period of scrutiny to, finally, the time when one reflects upon what has been seen.
Colombet’s paintings reminded me that there are artists who use paint to achieve something and artists who paint. She belongs to the latter group. Her paintings are clearly the result of a process that is connected to her contemplation of the world and the relationship between materiality and transience.” John Yau, Hyperallergic, March 6, 2021
Her focus on landscape and preservation of nature has naturally led her to be more and more involved in environment and climate change.
