When Simon Hantaï represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1982, he was already an established figure in post-war European painting. Then he largely disappeared from public view. He did not stop painting. He stopped exhibiting.

That period is the subject of Gagosian’s summer exhibition in Gstaad. Simon Hantaï: the last studio, curated by Anne Baldassari, brings together sixteen paintings made between 1982 and 1985, none of which Hantaï exhibited during his lifetime.

Hantaï is best known for inventing pliage, or “folding as method”. Rather than approaching a stretched canvas in the conventional way, he crumpled and knotted it, applied paint and then unfolded it. The parts hidden within the folds remained untouched, so the final composition was fully revealed only when the canvas was opened again.

In the works from his “last studio”, the process became freer. Wet canvases were folded so that paint could run along their creases; others were layered, cropped, torn and folded into smaller compositions. Hantaï was working alone and, without the prospect of an exhibition, apparently with considerable freedom.

The studio itself became part of the work. Many paintings were stapled one over another on the walls, creating layers of canvas rather than individual works hung neatly side by side. Baldassari describes this as Hantaï finding a new kind of boundlessness: no longer by making paintings increasingly large, but by building painting upon painting into the depth of the room.

We know something of how this looked thanks to Édouard Boubat, Hantaï’s close friend and one of the leading figures of French humanist photography. At Hantaï’s request, Boubat photographed him working in the studio. These images have become an important part of Baldassari’s research, helping to establish the chronology of the paintings and their original arrangement.

Some of the last studio works were first presented publicly in Hantaï’s major 2022 retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The Gstaad exhibition now concentrates specifically on this lesser-known period.

For visitors unfamiliar with Hantaï, the exhibition also offers a good introduction to an artist who allowed the physical act of folding, soaking and unfolding the canvas to determine part of what appeared on its surface. And for those who already know his work, these paintings show what happened when he continued working without an audience.

Simon Hantaï: the last studio | Where: Gagosian Gstaad | When: Until 27 September 2026