Marcia Hafif. La peinture est la même pour tout le monde

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American artist Marcia Hafif set out to reinvent painting. After starting her career under the sign of abstract expressionism, she stayed in Rome from 1961 to 1969. When she arrived in Italy, the streets, churches, advertising hoardings and traffic signs impressed her. Using these elements, she developed a new visual vocabulary and a palette of vivid colours. Her paintings explore the symmetry and repetition of forms and counterforms. Rather than enclosing herself in an abstract painting cut off from reality, Hafif’s work refers to everyday images without ever reducing them to a single meaning. Rounded shapes run through her Roman paintings and recall the curves of female bodies as well as the silhouettes of Etruscan ceramics. When Marcia Hafif returned to New York at the start of the 1970s, she found that abstraction seemed to be at an end. To keep creating, she had to begin again from scratch. She freed herself from any subjectivity in painting, as well as from subject matter, in order to focus on the essential: gestures, pigments, tools. Her research led her to monochrome, which she saw not as an endpoint but as a new beginning. She recorded all her works in an inventory, listing all her experiments with matter, pigments and supports in series. In 1978 Olivier Mosset got in touch with her, and together they founded the group Radical Painting, which was joined by other painters who shared their radicalism. Marcia Hafif’s paintings are the result of intellectual reflection: the artist uses colour to explain what painting is, as if it were defining itself through its own means. Marcia Hafif was born in 1929 in Pomona, California, and died in 2018 in Laguna Beach, California.