Simon Hantaï' (1922-2008) was a Hungarian-French painter born in Szeged, Hungary. After studying at the Budapest School of Fine Arts he travelled through Italy and settled in France in 1948. He became associated with the Surrealist group in Paris but broke with them in 1955, due to Breton’s refusal to accept that there was an affinity between the Surrealist technique of automatic writing and Jackson Pollock’s method of painting.

In response to Pollock’s new way of painting, Hantaï sought to explore the relationship between chance, process and intentionality in his own work which led him to invent his complex “pliage” method by 1960. This process involved first folding and knotting the canvas in various shapes and then dripping, splashing or pouring colour, which resulted in sections of the canvas appearing blank while others were interrupted by bold splashes of colour. The technique was also inspired by the marks left on his mother's apron after folding it.

Throughout his career, Hantaï's work shifted and evolved, often taking on different forms such as a network of crisp creases of unpainted canvas or a monochrome mass in the centre of an unprimed canvas.

In addition to his folding paintings, Hantaï also explored the theme of the figure in his Meuns series (1967-1968) and later in his Studies (1969). Hantaï lived in the small village of Meun in the Forest of Fontainebleau from 1966 and stated that it was during this time that he realised his true subject was “the resurgence of the ground underneath my painting”.

His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 1976, and a Simon Hantaï retrospective that opened at the Centre Pompidou in 2013, showcasing over 130 works from 1949 to the 1990s.

A representative collection of Hantaï's work can be found at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.