Gouache and watercolour composition by François OZENDA, 1923-1976

Abstract composition. Gouache on cardboard. Signed at the bottom right. 20x20 cm. Framed 25.5x25.5 cm. Very good condition. OZENDA (1923-1976) Born in Marseille. Chaotic childhood. Brief studies. (A time at the School of Fine Arts, a few days in a monastery...). Led a wandering existence throughout his life, day by day, by chance encounters. Arrived in Vence in the 1950s, he stayed there for about twenty years. Hosted from 1950 in Vence at the studio of Alphonse Chave and then with the lithographer Pierre Chave. An Art Brut painter, a marginal artist, he creates in his paintings an unusual world, a tangle of ghostly, mysterious, and hallucinatory faces, in which primitive drawings are accumulated and arranged to form a kind of precious illumination. After his death, retrospective exhibitions were dedicated to him in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, etc. Listed in Bénézit, Akoun, Artprice. Musée d'Épinal.