French painter, draughtsman and maker of objects, born in 1927 in Foix (Ariège).
Life
Christian d’Orgeix settled in Paris in 1946 and worked at first for an advertising agency and for a theatre designer. In 1948-1949 he assisted Hans Bellmer with the publication of Les Jeux de la Poupée (Éditions Premières, 1949), hand-colouring the silver prints.
A trip to London in 1949 introduced him to the Pre-Raphaelites and William Blake. He spent 1950 in Spain, where his first drawings were made, including the series La Barrière de corail, then returned to Paris in 1951 and began assembling sculptures from scrap materials, in the spirit of Surrealism. He exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants in 1953.
Germany recognised him early: the Galerie Springer in Berlin gave him a solo exhibition in 1955, and he took part in documenta in Kassel in 1959 and 1964. He received the Paris Biennale prize in 1961 for a large canvas, Religieuse. In 1990 he left Paris for the south of France and settled in Alès.
The work
The gallery places him “at the crossroads of Surrealism and Lyrical Abstraction”. Alongside his canvases of the 1950s (Sous la colline, 1953; Cire humaine, 1954), he made object boxes (Éléphantisme, 1957) and assemblages, then, in the 1960s, figures composed of everyday materials, often inspired by mythological or historical characters.
The gallery devoted the exhibition “The Metamorphoses of Christian d’Orgeix” to him in 2023, which included a large Sans titre (c. 1960, oil on canvas, 196 x 130 cm, provenance Daniel Cordier). It showed him again in “Surrealist Prelude” (2024), in its summer 2025 exhibition, with a Sans titre of 1960 (oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm) and Béguine (c. 1960-1961, gouache and collage on paper, 27 x 35 cm), then in the gallery’s 25th anniversary exhibition (2026).
Exhibitions and collections
- Galerie Springer, Berlin, 1955
- documenta II (1959) and III (1964), Kassel
- Retrospectives: Galerie Michael Hasenclever, Munich, 2003; Musée de Cordes-sur-Ciel and Galerie Arnoux, Paris, 2006
- Monograph: Ragnar von Holten and José Pierre, d’Orgeix, Le Musée de poche, 1975