Artwork
Discover GRATALOUP’s major families of works.
Explore the artist’s universe through his paintings, urban creations, drawings & lithographs, installations, and objects.
About the Artwork
A leading figure in French contemporary art since the 1960s, GRATALOUP (1935–2022) was a visionary painter whose work follows in the lineage of great symbolists such as Gustav Klimt and Edvard Munch.
Guided by a search for meaning, he did not represent nature — he transfigured it. Pure colors and materials — sand, thick impasto, brass, gold, aluminum, and silver leaf — form a language that sculpts light.
Working in series, he returned to the same motif as one pursues a meditation — identical yet always renewed. Between the visible and the invisible, his inner landscapes open spaces for contemplation, where reality dissolves into imagination.
Unclassifiable and deeply attuned to the sacred, GRATALOUP created a singular and vibrant body of work — both tactile and spiritual — that continues to inspire.