Pierre Célice (1932–2019) developed a highly individual visual language in which colour, line and gesture gradually took precedence over representation. Born in Paris, he initially studied law before turning fully to drawing and painting. His early work was figurative, shaped in part by the influence of Henri Hayden, whom Célice regarded as an important mentor.

During the 1960s and 1970s, his forms became increasingly reduced and synthetic. A decisive period followed in the early 1970s, when Célice worked at Peter Bramsen’s lithography studio, a meeting place for international CoBrA artists. There he encountered the work and presence of artists including Bram van Velde, Pierre Alechinsky, Asger Jorn and Karel Appel. Célice subsequently moved fully away from figuration, although finding his own position within abstraction was not immediate; dissatisfied with much of what he produced, he destroyed several years’ worth of paintings before arriving at a language he felt was his own toward the end of the 1970s.

What emerged was a body of work characterised by strong fields of colour, graphic lines, collage and an energetic tension between construction and spontaneity. Célice’s compositions can feel almost architectural, yet never static. Shapes overlap, interrupt one another and shift between structure and improvisation. This interest in scale and spatial presence also extended beyond the canvas: throughout his career he realised numerous murals, sculptures and architectural commissions in and around Paris.

Célice exhibited extensively in France and internationally, from the Salon Jeune Peinture and the Paris Biennale in the 1950s and 1960s to later solo exhibitions in Paris, Milan, Copenhagen and Brussels. His work was also presented at the Évreux Museum and, from 2015 onwards, through a series of exhibitions with Maurice Verbaet in Antwerp and Knokke.

For Art The Hague 2026, The Millen House presents a focused selection of Célice’s work from the 1980s through the 2010s in collaboration with the Maurice Verbaet Collection. Seen together, these works reveal both the continuity and freedom of an artist who spent decades refining a language of colour, rhythm and movement without allowing it to become fixed.