Claire Tabouret

Claire Tabouret was born in 1981 in Pertuis, France. She studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, spending an exchange year at Cooper Union School of Art in New York in 2005 before graduating from the Beaux-Arts in 2006. She has lived and worked in Los Angeles since around 2015, while continuing to maintain ties and exhibition activity in France.

Her paintings, often large in scale, group figures such as adolescents, siblings, or debutantes in ambiguous, psychologically charged settings, alongside a recurring practice of self-portraiture. Solo exhibitions have appeared at Night Gallery in Los Angeles and Perrotin in Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, and, more recently, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (Au Bois d'Amour, 2023) and Almine Rech in Paris (D'un seul souffle, 2025 to 2026), alongside a concurrent solo exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris (2025 to 2026; exact title not confirmed in available sources). In 2024 she was chosen by the Diocese of Paris and the French Ministry of Culture, with support reported at the level of the French presidency, to design six new stained-glass windows for the south chapels of Notre-Dame Cathedral, with installation targeted for late 2026. A first museum-wide retrospective, Weaving Waters, Weaving Gestures, is scheduled to open at Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands from 31 January to 25 May 2026.

Art press coverage has framed Tabouret as one of the more compelling figurative painters of her generation, a reading reinforced by the pace of her institutional program: a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, concurrent Paris exhibitions at Almine Rech and the Grand Palais, and a first museum-wide retrospective at Museum Voorlinden, all within a few years of each other. Her selection to design new stained-glass windows for Notre-Dame Cathedral, a commission awarded by the Diocese of Paris and the French Ministry of Culture, has been widely reported as a marker of her standing in French cultural life. No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic could be confirmed against primary sources for this profile.

Tabouret's auction record is USD 870,000, set by Les débutantes (bleu azur) at Christie's New York in 2021, which surpassed her prior record of USD 862,229 (GBP 622,500) for The Last Day at Christie's London in March 2021. She is represented by Almine Rech, Perrotin, and Night Gallery, and her work has entered institutional collections including LACMA, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Her secondary market remains small relative to her exhibition profile, with a handful of six-figure results rather than an extended price history.

Tabouret's auction history is short. Two sales, both at Christie's and both in 2021, currently anchor her public price record, which means any single new result can meaningfully shift the picture rather than confirm an established trend. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authenticity generally run through her representing galleries, Almine Rech, Perrotin, and Night Gallery. Her institutional trajectory, museum surveys and the Notre-Dame commission, is unusually strong for an artist at this stage of an auction career, and collectors should weigh that momentum against the limited depth of public sale data available today.