Les Amants is a mixed technique color intaglio created in 1959 by American born artist Gail Singer. It is pencil signed, titled, dated, and editioned 33/45. It was printed on ivory Rives BFK paper and the platemark measures 10-7/8 x 15-3/16 inches.
Singer employed numerous intaglio processes with her print Les Amants, including carborundum, aquatint, and engraving. Orange-red shapes that float above a purple background are intersected by a network of undulating black lines. The brilliant colors and line work fully energize this extraordinary intaglio. Singer’s work is technically difficult and original.
In 1975, Stanley William Hayter praised her work: The work of Gail Singer is far from reassuring: its violent, shocked structures reflect our world…. Her work, both violent and moving, is the direct emanation of intuition and instinct. Her sense of color is unique: it is an integral part of the work and not a way of enhancing or adorning the image. Her strange, bewitching, obsessive constructions are linked to an element, unacknowledged perhaps, but absolutely authentic of our psyche. I admire Gail Singer's art for its truth, its strength, and its prodigious visual power.
Gail Singer, painter and printmaker, was born in Galveston, Texas on November 8, 1924. She was a graduate of the Mirabeau B. Lamar High School in Houston, Texas and, from 1946 to 1950, she studied fine arts at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. Singer was awarded the John T. Miliken Fellowship that allowed her to travel and study in Europe in 1952. She settled in Paris in 1955, working at Atelier 17 under Paul Buelin and Stanley William Hayter until the close of the 1960s. She remained in Paris for the rest of her life.
Singer worked in the intaglio process creatively combining the techniques of etching, aquatint, open bite, and viscosity. She also worked in relief, printing the surface of her matrix be it a metal plate, wood, or linoleum.
She participated in group exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts and, in Paris, at the Salon des Réalistés Nouvelles. Singer’s work was also included in the Atelier 17 exhibition that was mounted in 1962 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. The poster for the exhibition was a collaborative effort of Singer, Hayter, and Dadi Wirz. Singer also had solo exhibitions in Paris at the Galerie Le Soleil and, in 1975, at the Galerie Rive Gauche.
Gail Singer’s work is represented in the collections of the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison; the Kemper Art Museum and the Washington University Collections, Saint Louis; the British Museum, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Silkeborg Museum, Denmark; and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
According to Carla Esposito Hayter, Gail Singer died in Paris in 1985.
