To mark Paris Drawing Week, Galerie Dina Vierny is proud to present the first exhibition dedicated to the graphic work of Robert Couturier since 1959. Featuring nearly twenty works created between the 1930s and 1990s and accompanied by an exhibition catalogue, this selection highlights the vitality, inventiveness, and rigor of a medium to which the artist remained tirelessly devoted throughout his life.

Widely regarded as one of the preeminent post-war sculptors alongside Germaine Richier and Alberto Giacometti, Robert Couturier (1905–2008) was also—and fundamentally—a master draftsman. This dual practice was never incidental; rather, it reveals the profound unity of his creative vision. Whether through line or volume, Couturier spent a lifetime pursuing a singular goal: “to evoke the greatest possible humanity through the most reduced means.”

Conceived as a concise retrospective of his graphic oeuvre, the exhibition spans the artist’s entire career, from his early 1930s sketches to the final works of a centenarian creator. Across this diverse body of work, a coherent, unwavering gesture emerges—one that neither time nor age could diminish.

From adolescence, Couturier imposed a strict daily discipline upon himself: never to sleep without having drawn. It is no coincidence that his formal training began in lithography. For him, drawing was far more than an academic exercise; it was an inner necessity, an impulse he described with a personal neologism: déprendre (to detach or un-learn). This term underscores his commitment to total freedom, transforming the page into a space for play, visual pleasure, and a vibrant tension between the stated and the unsaid.

The works on display testify to the permanence of his favorite subjects: the human figure—woman, man, child, and couple—reinvented through a singular anatomical liberty. Much like Ingres and his penchant for controlled distortion, Couturier stretches, distends, and opens the form to reach a different reality.

His economy of means is a deliberate aesthetic choice, not a lack. Through the sheer tension of a contour or the joyful wandering of a line across the page, Couturier breathes life into the inert.

“The unusual and the playful function only through his plastic discoveries, which are always unexpected. Couturier awakens our gaze, reviving what is most alive in each medium—drawing and sculpture alike. What magic lies in his linear asceticism! Poetry is the ultimate victor.”
Lydia Harambourg, from the exhibition catalogue.