Robert Combas

Robert Combas was born in Lyon in 1957. Born into a working-class family, he trained at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier. He sought a return to figuration and greater artistic freedom. In the 1970s, he coined the term "Arab Pop Art", referring to the fake Arabic script that adorns his works and his references to the visual culture of advertising in African countries. In 1979, he initiated the figuration libre movement with Hervé Di Rosa. His work was the subject of a retrospective at Lyon's Musée d'Art Contemporain in 2012 and at Monaco's Grimaldi Forum in 2016. Today, he is a major figure in contemporary art, and is the only French artist to appear each year in Artprice's ranking of the 500 most highly-rated contemporary artists in the world. He has exhibited at the Grand Palais (2006) and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (2008).