ART BASEL PARIS: JACQUELINE LAMBA
For Art Basel Paris 2026, Pavec gallery is pleased to present, in the Premise sector of the fair, an original monographic project dedicated to Jacqueline Lamba (1910-1993), a singular yet still underappreciated figure in 20th-century painting.
Six months before the retrospective dedicated to her at the Cantini Museum in Marseille, the gallery is bringing together three monumental paintings from the Sources series, created between 1967 and 1986, all coming directly from the artist’s estate, preserved by her daughter, Aube Elléouët-Breton. Presented together for the first time at an international art fair, these major works will also be presented in the forthcoming retrospective in Marseille.
Long relegated to the margins of Surrealism and regarded primarily through her relationship with André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba is now the subject of a critical reassessment that reaffirms both the autonomy and the significance of her artistic practice. Her exile in New York during the Second World War marked a decisive turning point. Immersed in a new artistic environment and in dialogue with figures such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Alexander Calder, and Lee Krasner, she forged an increasingly liberated pictorial language, embracing the monumental scale, gestural freedom, and chromatic intensity of the emerging American abstract movement while preserving the lyrical and spiritual dimensions that remained central to her work.
Back in France, the Sources series marks the culmination of her artistic evolution. Deployed in monumental formats, these paintings unfold as expansive vibratory fields of light and color in perpetual transformation. In them, Lamba develops a unique synthesis between the visionary energy inherited from Surrealism and the formal expansion of postwar American painting. In these works, abstraction is neither purely formal nor merely gestural: it becomes cosmological, a meditation on origin, movement, and the invisible forces that structure both nature and inner experience.
This pictorial exploration is deeply rooted in Lamba’s intimate, almost physical relationship with water. Before embarking on her career as a painter, Jacqueline Lamba worked as an aquatic ballerina, and numerous photographs show her by the sea or immersed in swimming pools. This lifelong fascination profoundly informs the Sources series, which she developed while spending regular periods in Simiane-la-Rotonde, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence region of southern France. The limestone landscapes, the natural springs, the shimmering reflections and the transparency of the water directly nourished her pictorial imagination.
These paintings do not depict a landscape; they recreate its physical and sensory dynamics. The forms, often oval or circular, evoke areas of concentration, while their more unstable peripheries suggest processes of diffusion and transformation. Working through successive layers and allowing drips, deposits and retouches to remain visible, Lamba transforms the canvas into a medium traversed by flows and equilibria. Automatism inherited from Surrealism persists, yet in a profoundly altered way: the aim is no longer to explore the subconscious, but to grasp the dynamics and phenomena of slow, continuous formation that animate the natural world.
This series is also inextricably linked to the journey Jacqueline Lamba undertook with David Hare through the American West and Southwest in 1946. There she encountered Indigenous cultures, notably the Hopi and Navajo, whose conceptions of the world are founded upon dynamic systems of forces and balances, often organized around circular structures. The Sources thus echo the centered yet fluid structures of Navajo sandpaintings, in which the visible remains inseparable from invisible forces and form appears as the result of an ongoing process. Blending the legacy of Surrealism, American abstraction, and cosmological thought, this series gives rise to paintings of flux in which matter, energy, and perception converge.
Conceived specifically for Art Basel Paris 2026, the booth is designed as an immersive and contemplative environment, offering an international audience a rare opportunity to fully experience the physical, sensory, and meditative dimensions of these monumental works. Through this unprecedented monographic presentation, Pavec gallery aims to shed light on a pivotal yet still underexplored chapter in Jacqueline Lamba’s oeuvre. More broadly, the project seeks to reaffirm the artist, not as a peripheral figure in Surrealism or Breton’s muse, but as a major, visionary transatlantic painter whose work engages fully with the transformations of postwar art between Paris and New York.
