French sculptor and illustrator, Richier began her career in sculpture in 1922, working with Louis-Jacques Guigues, director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier for three years. In 1925, she moved to Paris where she worked with Emile-Antoine Bourdelle and, in 1934, she had her first one-woman show at the Max Kaganovitch Gallery. In the same year, she took part in the exhibition La Passion du Christ dans l'art français at the Trocadero and, two years later, received the Blumenthal prize. In 1937, she received an honorary diploma at the Paris Universal Exhibition. Her work remained essentially figurative until the Second World War and, as from the 40s, her work was influenced by Giacometti. In 1948 she exhibited, at the Maeght Gallery in Paris, large sculptures in bronze revealing a universe of disturbing and metamorphosed creatures. Between 1948 and 1954, she regularly took part in the Venice Biennal. In 1950, she was one of the leading women artists in the School of Paris and, in 1951, worked with Vieira da Silva and Hartung. In 1955, she took part in an exhibition organised by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and, in 1956, had a major retrospective in Paris. In 1959 and 1964, she took part in Documenta 2 and 3 in Kassel. Her figures are creatures somewhere between human and animal with references to the apocalyptic symbolism of Surrealist fantasy. Despite her premature death, her influence was considerable on the generation of post war British sculptors, such as Reg Butler, Armitage, Chadwick, César and Saint-Phalle.
