Vert 1, 2023

Frédéric Prat  

Frédéric Prat is a French abstract painter born in 1966. His work is strictly non-figurative. He lives and works in Paris (France). Frédéric Prat received his diploma from the Paris Beaux-Arts School in 1991. He studied with French artists Joel Kermarrec, Toni Grand and Claude Viallat.

In 2005, Prat evolved from oil painting to acrylic, which he has used exclusively since then. Prat paints on canvas (often of a fairly large size) or paper.

Colour and material are the main subject matter of Prat’s painting. He voluntarily excludes any recognisable forms from his work. In this respect, it is difficult to not mention Prat’s close relationship with Support-Surface, a French artistic movement from the 70’s who’s members claimed that «the purpose of a painting is the painting itself, and artworks only refers to themselves, not to anything external such as the artist’s personality, his life, or art history».

Indeed, Prat studied with one of Support-Surface most prominent member, Claude Viallat. However, Prat’s main source of inspiration and favourite painters are abstract expressionists such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Willem de Kooning, as well as other American artists such as Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, Hans Hoffman and Robert Ryman. "Those who, by their propositions, are in search of truth in painting and who consequently historically inscribe abstraction and painting as an object". (Frédéric Prat)