Fabienne Verdier’s “From Song to Light” at Waddington Custot, Dubai: When a Brushstroke Learns to Sing

Picture a studio with a brush hanging from the ceiling — a large brush the painter guides, standing over a canvas laid flat on the floor, in one unbroken movement. That is how Fabienne Verdier has worked for years, and it is the key to Fabienne Verdier’s “From Song to Light” at Waddington Custot, Dubai. Opening on 16 November 2026 during Alserkal Art Week, the exhibition gathers thirteen works made between 2015 and 2024 into what amounts to a compact retrospective of her last decade: three paintings and ten screenprints that travel, in the gallery’s phrase, from the breath of a singer to the light of a distant star.

A Parisian trained in Sichuan

Verdier was born in Paris in 1962 and graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse. In 1984 she won a postgraduate scholarship to the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and spent nearly ten years in China studying classical painting and calligraphy with Chinese masters — an apprenticeship she later recounted in her 2005 autobiography, Passagère du silence, translated into English in 2024. From that training she took not a style but a discipline: the idea that a single stroke can hold the energy of a whole landscape.

Her subject has long been the energy of the natural world; over the last decade it has increasingly been music. In 2014 she was artist-in-residence at The Juilliard School in New York. A retrospective at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence followed in 2019, and in 2025 she had solo exhibitions at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in Paris and at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire. Her work is in collections including the Centre Pompidou, the Musée Unterlinden and the Pinakothek der Moderne. She has shown with Waddington Custot since the gallery’s first year in Dubai, 2016.

Schubert’s wanderer, Mozart’s spiral

The exhibition opens with voice. Voyage d’hiver 3 and Voyage d’hiver 4 (2016) belong to a series of eight paintings made while listening to Schubert’s Winterreise, the cycle of 24 songs for voice and piano composed a year before his death. In this series, according to the gallery, Verdier layered her energy-strokes for the first time, so that any sense of scale dissolves — much as Schubert’s wanderer can no longer tell whether he is moving through the landscape or the landscape is moving past him.

Mozart follows. The four Aria screenprints (2021) were printed on Verdier’s own studio press under the master screenprinter Michel Caza. Each derives from an aria — from Zaide, Le nozze di Figaro, the concert aria “Bella mia fiamma” and the Queen of the Night’s aria from Die Zauberflöte — and each shows a helix turning in one colour against another: black on yellow, green on vermilion, violet on khaki, blue and gold on black. They grew out of her Vortex paintings, which in turn came from a 2014 Juilliard masterclass with the soprano Edith Wiens, whose teaching about breath suggested to Verdier a voice rising in a spiral.

Night music and the single gesture

Nuit d’opéra à Aix (2017), made for the 69th Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, is described by the gallery as a “visual partita”: musical phrases run along stave-like lines and rise out of deep blue, recalling the festival’s open-air evening performances. Ressac d’une nuit d’été (Undertow of a Summer Night, 2019) extends the nocturne, with teal currents drifting over black like the sea after dark. Between them, the screenprints Énergie blanche and Destins croisés (2015) return to the root of everything — one continuous stroke, laid down without correction.

The song of the stars

The final movement is cosmic. Three prints from 2024 — Nonkanyamba, Mézané and Dara Reaksmey — each show a ring of light in red, pale gold or deep blue around a dark centre flecked with white sparks, which the gallery likens to the shell of light released by a dying star. They extend Le Chant des étoiles, a 2021 series for the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar for which Verdier worked with around a hundred linguists, anthropologists, historians and ethnologists to collect names for stars, the moon, the sky and night from five continents, writing one in its original script on the back of each canvas. Nonkanyamba, for instance, is Xhosa for “she who is a vivid storm”.

Dubai, Alserkal and the gallery

Waddington Custot, with spaces in London, Paris and Dubai, occupies Warehouse 84 on Alserkal Avenue in Al Quoz, the city’s main gallery district. Opening the show during Alserkal Art Week places Verdier at the centre of Dubai’s busiest art moment; it follows her earlier Dubai solo shows, Voyage d’hiver (2022) and Energy Lines (2023, with Christie’s Middle East).

Why it matters for collectors and painters

For collectors, the balance of three paintings to ten screenprints is significant: studio-printed editions offer a way into an artist with major museum holdings, and the show presents both side by side. For painters, Verdier is a case study in how constraint creates freedom. One continuous gesture, a suspended brush, a canvas on the floor — and from that discipline, a body of work that sings.

Visiting information

Waddington Custot, Unit 84, Street 6A, Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz 1, Dubai. From 16 November 2026; Alserkal Avenue lists the closing date as 16 January 2027. Opening hours and reception details were not published on the exhibition page — check with the gallery on +971 4 346 8148. See the official From Song to Light exhibition page, our Fabienne Verdier Dubai listing, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.