Outsider Artist Gerard Sendrey

Gérard Sendrey (French, b. 1928)

Born in 1928, Gérard Sendrey lives in a suburb of Bordeaux, France. He worked as an administrative executive until the age of 40, when he decided to devote the rest of his life to painting. He began drawing, employing a technique of finely meshed lines, obsessively covering the paper and creating a delicate graphic texture in which figures, mostly human, appear unexpectedly. His first exhibition took place in 1979 at the influential Galerie du Fleuve in Paris. As a result of this show and many others, Sendrey’s reputation, and demand for his artwork, grew.

In 1987 Michael Thevoz, director of the Collection de L’Art Brut, said the following about Sendrey’s work:
“The public gives favor to pictures that satisfy his need of reality, identity, objective security or that confirm his feeling about a good form, a good taste, an aesthetic norm. Artist’s who don’t yield to this are rare. Gérard Sendrey is surely one who chooses adventure, discomfort, risk and who prefers the shattering surprise that can be given by a dream of a line rather than the art lovers’ approval.”

Sendrey’s art is included in many private and public collections, including the permanent collections of the Collection de L’Art Brut in Lausanne, L’Aracine in Villeneuve D’Ascq, the Fabuloserie in Dicy and Le Centre de Diffusion D’art en Marge in Brussels, the Museum de Stadshof in Zwolle and the American Museum of Folk art in New York.

Judy A Saslow Gallery