Jean Sanglar

Born 1926. Fréjus, France; Died 1996. Paris

Jean Sanglar began drawing at a young age. He frequented underground artistic circles in New York and London where he met many notable artists, specifically Francis Bacon. He frequently exhibited in Paris throughout the 1960s where he won a silver medal. In 1968 he exhibited jointly with Pablo Picasso.
His work is characterized by an artistic and conceptual rigour. His paintings often contain large uniform colour fields intersecting and harmonizing in different geometric planes. His assertive talent presents a humanity which is at once surreal and grotesque.
Sanglar’s paintings are lively and violent: the pastel strokes and knife marks cut through layers of paint, knitting complex webs, birthing mysterious golems and ghostly forms, casting a hallucinatory and haunted gaze upon the world.
His figures possess expressive facial expressions, pale bodies, gigantic hands, inhabiting unusual situations, leaving the viewer with more questions than answers.
Sanglar’s expressionist style draws from Edvard Munch, Lucien Freud, Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon, presenting a strange but pointed vision of the world.