FERNBERGER

Eutierria, Vicky Colombet’s second solo exhibition at Fernberger can be understood as a synthesis of her interconnected series: Landscapes from Above, From the Floating World, Antarctica, Light and Water, and the Monet Series. The concept of eutierria, a term coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht describing a deep sense of harmony and connectedness with the Earth, lies at the core of Colombet’s decades-long practice.

Rather than depict a specific place, Colombet seeks to evoke the very idea of landscape. She conceives of her paintings as landscapes in and of themselves. Like the natural environment, her works capture the fleeting vibrations of mist, wind, water, and light, functioning as visual catalysts that invite contemplation.

By minimizing visible brushwork, Colombet allows her hand to recede, creating the sensation that nature itself is forming the image. “I would like to give [my works] the feeling that it is nature painting,” she said in a 2020 interview with Marianne Alphant for the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. “The brush produces the wind, the speed; the pigments provide the earth, the rocks.”

Her pursuit of an “inner landscape” is supported by her singular use of pure pigments. Natural in origin and ground by hand rather than industrially processed, these materials lend her paintings a subtle, almost auratic vibration, offering viewers a heightened perception of color. Many of her pigments are, quite literally, of the earth. Each possesses distinct physical properties—weight, density, texture—that determine how it moves across the canvas. Colombet harnesses these differences in her mystifying compositions, allowing particles to settle, layer, or disperse in ways that mirror natural processes of sedimentation and movement.

She blends these pigments with oil and alkyd mediums to form a paste similar to commercial oil paint, then dilutes the mixture with mineral spirits to further release the pigments’ unique characteristics. Her process recreates terrestrial conditions at a human scale, guiding pure pigments suspended in liquid across the canvas with ultra fine brushes. For Colombet, “every element participates in the creation of the painting: the brush, the paints, the canvas, how I breathe, how I move. Everything counts. It all materializes. It gives the incarnation of the painting.” She describes her practice as a collaboration between herself and her materials. Having studied and practiced Buddhism for decades, the dissolution of ego in her work and her submission to chance represents a quiet meeting point between Eastern and Western methodology and philosophy.

Anchoring the exhibition Eutierria is a pivotal 2024 painting, Mozart in the Summer (Chasing Light), among the first large-scale works in which Colombet incorporated metallic pigment. The painting was exhibited at the Torggler Fine Arts Center in Newport News, Virginia, in Reflections: Surface and Substance (2024). Initially, she saw her use of reflective material as an extension of her ongoing interest in the interaction of light and water. Over time, however, the silver pigment came to feel more closely aligned with her Antarctica series, evoking prismatic glacial structures and refracted light—an association that carried into subsequent works.

The exhibition also includes paintings incorporating gold pigment, another recent addition to Colombet’s palette. Gold is one of the few elements formed not on Earth but through cosmic events, a fact that lends it what Colombet describes as a “refugee” status on this planet and adds a poignant dimension to its place within human systems of value.

This celestial thread is paired with a suite of new works that extend her From the Floating World and Monet Series, continuing her exploration of light on the surface of water. These paintings introduce a more intimate scale and an intensified palette that includes vivid reds. In Sunset #1630, red pigment interacts strikingly with reflective silver, while works such as Going Into the Wilderness #1602, with its deep and complex greens, suggest that entering nature, though grounding, can also feel otherworldly.

Vicky Colombet (b. 1953, Paris) has exhibited extensively internationally. This is her second solo exhibition at Fernberger, Los Angeles. Her work will be featured in several major institutional exhibitions in 2026 and 2027. In the fall of 2026, she will participate in Histoires de Paysages – De Monet à Hockney, curated by Pierre Wat, at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. The exhibition will subsequently travel to the Musée de Grenoble, where it will be on view from March 5 to July 4, 2027. Colombet is also currently included in Pollen, a group exhibition curated by Cédric Fauq at the CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux, on view from October 6, 2025 through March 1, 2026. Her work is further represented in the museum’s permanent collection with a painting from her Antarctica series. In June 2026, her work will be included in The Durand-Ruel Legacy, curated by Marianne Mathieu at Geelong Gallery in Australia (June 19 to October 11, 2026). Opening in November, 2026, Colombet will present a solo exhibition at the Maison Française at New York University, accompanied by an opening performance with cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton.

In 2020, she was the subject of Unexpected Dialogue: Monet/Colombet at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, which paired her work with that of Claude Monet and was accompanied by a museum catalogue. Following this exhibition, the Musée Marmottan Monet in collaboration with the French consulate in Shanghai organized the exhibition The Sun Rises Everyday: Monet, Colombet, Fromanger at the Bund Art Museum, Shanghai (2020-2021).

Her work is held in the collections of the CAPC Bordeaux, France; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly Albright-Knox), Buffalo, NY; and the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, among other public and private collections. She is the recipient of grants from the Esther and Adolf Gottlieb Foundation (2001) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2014).

Eutierria will run from February 21-April 4, 2026.

For images, press requests or more information, please contact Fernberger at info@fernbergergallery.com or call 917-831-6931.

Vicky Colombet (b. 1953, Paris) lives and works between the Hudson Valley, New York City and Paris.

Colombet was raised in Paris by her French father and Filipino mother, who traveled extensively throughout Asia with her. These early travels and exposure to eastern culture and philosophy proved incredibly influential in her later artistic development.

While studying at the Sorbonne, Colombet was enveloped in a progressive Parisian Intelligentsia. Helmed by Simone de Beauvoir, Colombet co-founded the "Women's Rights League" and the newspaper, "The Feminist News". She also collaborated with iconic French actress and outspoken Feminist Delphine Seyrig on several Feminist projects including her film "Be Pretty and Shut Up" (1981).

Colombet began her career as a painter in her early twenties, studying in the atelier of French painter Henri Dimier (1899-1986), who introduced Colombet to a painstaking process of deconstructed painting involving grinding and mixing raw pigments with various solvents (oil, copal, plaster and water) from which Colombet evolved and created her own technique. Experimenting with the weights of pigments, their type of granulation, chemical response, their specific vibrations and steps for grinding, she creates her otherworldly compositions.

In the early 1980s, during a time when painting was declared “dead”, Colombet created a type of painting that did not announce itself as painting. With the aim of pausing viewers upon encountering her work, Colombet developed her singular style and methodology of painting to resemble photochemical development processes or even a form of printing, but distinctly not painting. Despite using incredibly traditional painting materials, Colombet’s obfuscation of her own hand in the work presents something iconoclastic and enigmatic.

As she developed her own style and technique of painting, Colombet also embarked on a deeper study of Buddhism (to which she had been exposed during her childhood travels) with Vietnamese monk and peace activist, Thích Nhất Hạnh. Her initial rigorous study at Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery in the south of France, and her continued Buddhist practice have tremendously affected her work.

Her flattened but incredibly dimensional works have the power to evoke Buddhist concepts of oneness–that the macro and the micro exist on the same continuum. Partnered with her existing interest in the works of painters with ethereal, mathematical and philosophical leanings such as Fra Angelico, Piero Della Francesca, Ad Reinhardt, Yves Klein, Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin, Colombet has developed a style completely her own. She believes the use of pure pigment, chemical compounds born of the cosmos, gives unique vibrations and emotional resonance to her work.

In the intervening years, Colombet has shown her work extensively internationally. She was recently the subject of the exhibition, “Unexpected Dialogue: Monet/Colombet” that paired her work with Claude Monet’s at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, for which the museum produced an exhibition catalogue. Her work is included in the collections of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, as well as several international private collections. She has been awarded the Esther and Adolf Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2001) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2014).