Document is delighted to present Peintures, an exhibition of recent works by celebrated French artist Claude Viallat. Opening on November 8, this exhibition marks Viallat’s first solo presentation in Portugal.

Born in 1936 in Nîmes, France, where he still lives and works, Claude Viallat is a foundational figure of the Supports/Surfaces movement that emerged in the south of France in the late 1960s and 1970s. Viallat engages with a post-structuralist philosophy by treating stretchers, textiles, and pigments as their own subjects of investigation. He creates paradoxically austere yet exuberant objects and installations that reframe the traditional materials of painting, completely free from aesthetic commitment. For example, he often utilizes fragments from tents as supports and sheets as surfaces.

Over his six-decade career, Viallat has continually revisited and reproduced a distinctive, ambiguous, amoeba-like shape that has become the artist’s trademark and signature. This recurring motif appears across all kinds of surfaces in his work, including rugs, tents, curtains and other loose fabrics, endlessly repeating itself, yet always creating something new.

For his exhibition at Document Lisbon, Viallat presents recent paintings on fabric, cardboard, and paper. Collecting, cutting, joining, and painting over textiles of diverse patterns, colors, and textures, he exercises a unique freedom that challenges the conventions of painted surface, turning everyday materials into works of abstracted beauty.

Claude Viallat (b. 1936, Nîmes, France) studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier from 1955 to 1959 and later at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under the guidance of Raymond Legueult. Viallat’s work was featured at the Centre Pompidou in 1982 and at the Venice Biennale in 1988, garnering international recognition. Alongside his artistic practice, Viallat has had a distinguished teaching career at art schools across France, including Nice, Limoges, Marseille, Nîmes—where he served as director—and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Claude Viallat is represented in the collections of major institutions in France and beyond, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; MAMAC Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain, Nice, France; Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France; The Museum of Modern Art, New York. NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; and SMAK Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium.