Lucas Ratton Gallery, in collaboration with Dina Vierny Gallery, is presenting this summer in Gassin the most significant exhibition devoted to the sculptor Robert Couturier since 2005. Bringing together twenty-two sculptures in the garden and around ten works indoors, the exhibition places his work in dialogue with African and Oceanic artworks, revealing unexpected formal and poetic correspondences.

Alongside Alberto Giacometti and Germaine Richier, his exact contemporaries, Robert Couturier represents one of the three major currents of post-war French sculpture. Where Giacometti endowed his figures with an existential, solemn, and tragic dimension, and Richier created a world inhabited by hybrid, sometimes monstrous bodies, Couturier responded with a sculpture that is profoundly human, light, and poetic, often imbued with subtle humour. Together, they radically transformed figurative sculpture in the aftermath of the Second World War, each pursuing a singular artistic path.

Originally trained in lithography before devoting himself entirely to sculpture, Couturier first worked in the tradition of Aristide Maillol, serving as his studio assistant and remaining an admirer throughout his life. He achieved his first success before the war with Le Jardinier, installed on the Esplanade du Trocadéro for the 1937 International Exposition, a commission that enabled him to build a house and studio on Villa Seurat in Paris, where he would live for the rest of his life. Invited to exhibit three times at the Venice Biennale, his work gradually gained international recognition, from Japan to Canada, and major retrospectives were dedicated to him at the Musée Rodin (1970), the Monnaie de Paris (1975), and the Musée Maillol (2005).

Couturier is widely regarded as the inventor of allusive sculpture. Whereas sculpture had traditionally sought to occupy space, he made emptiness a material in its own right, allowing the eye to move freely through the very heart of his figures. His work constantly seeks a balance between presence and lightness, construction and disappearance. He summarised this ambition in a simple yet eloquent statement: “My greatest joy is to evoke as much humanity as possible while seeking the most reduced and simplest means of expression through matter.”

Couturier described his work as "anti-sculpture," even "anti-Maillol." Not because he opposed his master, whom he deeply admired, but because he sought to challenge the conventions of traditional sculpture. Where Maillol constructed solid, dense, sensuous volumes, Couturier draws space itself, allows emptiness to circulate, and suggests rather than asserts. His figures sometimes seem to exist in a state of precarious balance, assembled with a deliberately economical use of means, as though they were less sculptures than the very idea of sculpture. This negative definition of sculpture led him to create a sculpture of emptiness, in which the absence of material becomes just as important as the material itself.

His way of looking at everyday objects, recalling Joan Miró or Pablo Picasso, also reflects this remarkable freedom of invention. A gutter cut in half becomes Soldat through its hieratic presence; a salvaged cone is transformed into Femme qui marche; the shape of a bar of soap gives rise to the striking Femme assise; while simple wooden planks become Jumeaux.

The exhibition offers a genuine journey through Couturier's oeuvre. The sculptures presented in the garden span nearly half a century of creation, from 1944 to 2000, allowing visitors to follow the evolution of an artist who, throughout his exceptionally long life—one hundred and three years—never ceased to renew his sculptural vocabulary while remaining faithful to one essential pursuit: creating, through a remarkable economy of means, a sculpture that is profoundly alive, free, and deeply human.