An artist who used spray paint and colors squeezed directly from paint tubes, Martin Barre was from France where he was born in Nantes. Living and working in Paris, he is considered the precursor of minimal art in France. His oeuvre is exceptionally varied and always dominated by the necessity of reduction and purification and the desire to eradicate the arbitrariness typical of the "abstraction lyrique" (lyrical abstraction).

In the mid Fifties Martin Barre reacted radically to the theatrical "gestualisme" and subjectivist pretence of the Jeune Ecole de Paris and embraced the purest forms of abstract painters such as Kasimer Malevich and Piet Mondrian.

In the early 1960s Barre focused his attention on achieving ...