An iconic, committed and inexorably free gallery owner, Suzanne Tarasiève has combined the history of European art with the present for 45 years to invite us to cross our borders and awaken our eyes.
Fascinated by painting since childhood, Suzanne Tarasiève forged her taste by observing with delight the Dutch still life hung in her maternal grandmother and then the reproductions of Kirchner, Bosch and Munch that she discovered at the age of 11 and who became her first idols. As a teenager, she flipped through school textbooks and magazines in search of sculptures, images and art objects that she cut to make her room a first miniature gallery. A passion springs from these chance encounters, and when a violent car accident acts as an electroshock for her, she decides to devote all the energy that animates her to the visual arts.
After trying her hand at painting Suzanne Tarasiève understands that her vocation is not to create but rather to showcase art. She then decided to found her first gallery and in 1978 opened the doors of a space dedicated to the avant-garde in Barbizon. In this former fief of landscape painting, the whole of Paris parades to discover at this young gallery passionate to the iconoclastic look of artists who, from Pincemin to Christian Bonnefoi to César, assume the transition from abstraction to figuration and enjoy as much as they challenge.
With her sharp look and her incomparable taste, Suzanne Tarasiève manages to bring together on her walls artists already reputed abroad but still not accessible in France, like the great German artists Georg Baseltiz or Jörg Immendorff, who entrust his works to him. Eager for discoveries, she travels regularly in Germany from the fall of the wall, is one of the first gallery owners to discover the painters of Leipzig and will represent in France many artists met at that time.
When she left Barbizon to set up in Paris her first gallery in the 13th arrondissement, then «the Loft» in Belleville, she remained, against the tide, faithful to her favorite media: painting, photography and sculpture. To her collectors – who often have it, like the artists, followed by Barbizon at her last gallery, opened in 2011 in the Marais – she recommends as well the renowned artists she represents, from Juergen Teller to Boris Mikhailov, whom she discovered in 1999, through Eva Jospin, as well as those on which she bet very early on such as Markus Oehlen or Katherine Bernhardt.
Convinced that «artists who seek to please have already lost themselves before finding themselves», Suzanne Tarasiève kept her passion until the last moments and refused throughout her career to think in terms of odds and speculation. Today we are losing a singular voice in the world of art and will keep in mind its exactness, its simplicity and its constant audacity.
I extend my sincere condolences to his family and loved ones.