What Makes Claire Tabouret Famous
Claire Tabouret is one of today’s most compelling figurative painters, whose evocative images explore childhood, identity, memory, and collective experience. This story delves into her signature works, materials, methods, prices, and public visibility.
Her large-scale figurative paintings featuring children, debutantes, self-portraits, and theatrical group scenes have earned her acclaim. She often blends bright fluorescent layers with muted tonality to evoke dreamlike ambiguity.
Series like “Makeup” (2015–ongoing) focus on young girls with smeared cosmetics, symbolizing early notions of identity and masking .
Her painting The Last Day (2016), depicting costumed children, sold for over €580,000 at auction (about $863,000) and became a milestone of her market success .
She has also taken on public commissions, most notably being selected by France to design six new stained‑glass windows for Notre‑Dame Cathedral, combining contemporary vision with architectural heritage .
Claire Tabouret Famous Paintings
Les Débutantes (2014), a series inspired by debutante balls, has become iconic, Les Débutantes (bleu azur) fetched a record $870,000 at Christie’s New York in 2021 .
The Makeup series (from 2015), exploring gender, adolescence, and ritualistic painting, reveals her layered process of portrait underpainting plus colorful makeup washes .
Lockdown Self‑Portraits (2020), created during the pandemic, capture solitude and introspection in minimalist yet expressive ink and acrylic works.
Notre‑Dame stained‑glass project: A major ongoing commission (2024–2026), her abstracted reinterpretation of Viollet‑le‑Duc’s designs unfolds through luminous human figures in pink, turquoise, yellow, even within spiritual architecture.
How much do her artworks cost?
Works offered at auction range from ~ $117 USD (small prints) to $870,000 USD (large oil painting) .
Estimated broad range:
Prints & multiples: €90 to €21,000
Drawings & watercolors: €9,400 to €21,200
Oil paintings: €10,500 up to €580,500+, with record sales reaching $863K–$870K (2021).
What is Claire Tabouret known for?
Tabouret is celebrated for:
Psychologically charged figurative painting, often showing children, women, and self-portraits in ambiguous, ritual-like groupings.
Her Makeup and Lockdown Self‑Portraits series: explorations of identity, memory, vulnerability, and performative gesture .
Major public commissions, transforming sacred spaces like Château de Fabrègues chapel murals (2017), and Notre‑Dame stained glass windows (ongoing) .
International solo exhibitions in institutions like Almine Rech Gallery, Perrotin, Night Gallery, Yuz Museum, Petra Canonica Museum, and Venice Biennale collateral events .
How does she create her artwork?
Starting point: found, archival, or personal photographs, often of children or group scenes, reinterpreted with painterly license .
A dual-layer process: first she paints a realistic portrait or scene, then overlays it with “makeup” washes, thick strokes, fluorescence, neon tones, adding a gestural, performative mark.
She works simultaneously across multiple media, paintings, drawings, monotypes, letting ideas from one inform another .
For the stained‑glass windows, Tabouret prepared digital sketches abstracting historical designs, which will be realized in collaboration with Atelier Simon‑Marq by 2026 .
How many artworks has she produced?
She produced over 700 self‑portraits in ink on paper in just two years (2012–2014) as part of a daily ritual, before switching to painting in LA.
Beyond that series, her studio holds multiple bodies of work at any given time, from large canvases to monotypes to drawings. She avoids industrial seriality, treating each body as a cohesive ensemble inspired by cross‑pollination between works.
Total exact count unknown, but clearly hundreds of works exist across media (paintings, prints, sculpture, installations).
What art style is she associated with & what materials does she use?
Her style aligns with contemporary figurative art, blending gestural abstraction with recognizable figures; emotional resonance lies in the tension between presence and erasure .
Her palette merges natural earth tones with fluorescent, artificial hues, a painterly signature that hints at both innocence and distortion.
Materials: oil and acrylic paint, ink, watercolor, monotype prints, occasionally bronze (e.g. fountains at Musée Picasso), murals, and stained glass glass panels .
Where are Claire Tabouret’s artworks located?
Her works reside in major public collections including:
Centre Pompidou (Paris)
LACMA (Los Angeles)
Institute of Contemporary Art Miami
Dallas Museum of Art
Musée Picasso (Paris)
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Montréal) among others.
Exhibited at institutions and galleries worldwide: Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, MO.CO Montpellier, Venice Biennale (2022), Yuz Museum Shanghai, Night Gallery Los Angeles, Perrotin (Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong), Almine Rech (Paris, London).
Public commissions include the installed chapel murals at Château de Fabrègues and the upcoming Notre-Dame stained-glass windows to be unveiled by end of 2026 in Paris.
A fictive glimpse into her studio
In her airy Los Angeles studio, Tabouret shifts among canvases, papers, and prints, navigating a fluid ecology of creation. She starts with a child’s portrait, referencing archival or found imagery. Each underpainting lays the bones. Then she smears, layers, disturbs, with gestural strokes of fluorescent pigment, adding a psychological charge, as if the subject wears an emotional mask.
Nearby, monotypes rest: faint ghost‑stains echo scenes of conflict or desire. On her walls hang early self‑portraits, 700+ ink-drawings executed daily like ritual, mapping time, space, memory. Tabouret has explained how these works were her attempt to form a safe bubble during a dislocated period while traveling and moving before establishing a studio in LA.
Now her reach extends beyond canvas. In Paris, Notre-Dame beckons. She imagines congregants in prayer, awash with turquoise and pink light, abstracted forms dancing in windows. Collaborating with Atelier Simon‑Marq, she’s translating paint into glass, still painted scenes, but architectural, spiritual, luminous.
Tabouret’s work is intimate yet public, memory materialized, childhood and identity staged. Her auction prices, from modest prints to nearly $900K paintings, reflect both her emotional depth and her market prestige. Whether in museums, cathedrals, or private collections, her works invite presence, reflection, and transformation.
Quick Summary Table
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Famous artworks | “The Last Day,” Les Débutantes, Makeup series, Lockdown Self‑Portraits, Notre-Dame windows |
| Price range | From ~$117 for prints up to ~$870,000 for paintings |
| Known for: | Figurative painting, psychological depth, group scenes and identity exploration |
| Creation method | Mixed-medium: paintings of portraits, layered with smeared “makeup”, drawing, monotypes, stained glass |
| Quantity | Hundreds of works (700+ self‑portraits, many painting series and prints) |
| Style & materials | Contemporary figurative, gestural brushwork, fluorescent + natural palette, oil, acrylic, ink, watercolor, print, stained glass |
| Artwork locations | Public collections: Pompidou, LACMA, ICA Miami, Dallas Museum of Art, Musée Picasso; commissions like Notre-Dame (Paris) and Château de Fabrègues |
Claire Tabouret’s art challenges and enchants: a visual language of memory and identity rendered in the tension between innocence and transformation. Whether painting smudged faces, eerie group portraits, or celestial stained glass, her work consistently reveals how identity may be performed, obscured, and revealed, all in paint, glass, and spectral light.
