Robert Combas

Robert Combas was born on 25 May 1957 in Lyon, France. He left general schooling at seventeen to study art formally. He spent about a year at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Sete before transferring to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier in 1975, where he remained for five years and earned an art diploma in 1979.

Around 1981, Combas became one of the central figures, alongside Herve Di Rosa, Francois Boisrond, and Remi Blanchard, in what came to be known as Figuration Libre, a deliberately raw, narrative style drawing on comic strips, rock music, and street imagery as a French counterpart to the graffiti and Neo-Expressionist currents then emerging in New York. Combas moved to Paris around 1980 to 1981 and has lived and worked there since. In 1983 he exhibited at Leo Castelli's New York gallery alongside Keith Haring, an early marker of international recognition. Museum surveys followed over the following decades, including exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1987), the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (1990), the Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1993), the Musee Paul-Valery in Sete (2000), the Seoul Museum of Art (2006), and the Fondazione Mudima in Milan (2009). His most extensive retrospective to date, Greatest Hits, opened at the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Lyon in 2012, followed by a further retrospective at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco in 2016. He remains active, with a solo exhibition, Combas, l'etat de mes choses, at Ceysson and Benetiere and a dedicated show, Guerre et paix, Combas au Pont du Gard, scheduled from 29 May to 1 November 2026.

Combas is consistently credited, alongside Francois Boisrond, Herve Di Rosa, and Remi Blanchard, as a founder of Figuration Libre, the movement that brought a deliberately unschooled, cartoon-derived figuration into French painting around 1980, often compared internationally to the graffiti and Neo-Expressionist scenes associated with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. His early 1983 pairing with Haring at Leo Castelli's gallery in New York, followed by a steady sequence of European and Asian museum exhibitions through the 1990s and 2000s, established him as a central figure in French contemporary painting well before his major retrospectives at the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Lyon (2012) and the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco (2016). No verbatim, attributable critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile; the strongest available signal of critical standing is this sustained institutional and museum program rather than a single defining review.

Combas's market is anchored more in institutional recognition within France than in a long, transparent international auction record. Market databases, including Artnet, Artprice, MutualArt, and Aucties.com, converge on the same top result: the 1986 acrylic A Pet Hit Parade! sold for roughly USD 353,267 (approximately EUR 300,000) in 2019, a figure that is consistently reported across sources even though the specific auction house, city, and exact sale date are not confirmed in any publicly accessible record. ArtMajeur notes that Combas is the only French artist to appear consistently in Artprice's annual list of the top 500 contemporary artists, a mark of sustained market presence rather than a single headline result. He is currently shown by Strouk Gallery, Ceysson and Benetiere, Estades Gallery, and Opera Gallery, and continued gallery and museum activity through 2026 suggests an active, if still developing, secondary market.

Combas is a living artist with no published catalogue raisonne identified in current sources, so provenance and authentication rely on his representing galleries and studio rather than a codified reference work. His widely cited auction high of roughly USD 353,267 for A Pet Hit Parade! is well corroborated on price and title across independent market databases, but the auction house, city, and exact date of that 2019 sale are not confirmed anywhere publicly accessible, which argues for caution before treating it as a fully documented benchmark. His deepest track record is institutional and French, built through decades of museum retrospectives, while his broader international auction history is comparatively sparse and worth verifying sale-by-sale before drawing conclusions about trend or trajectory.