Simon Hantaï left Soviet-occupied Budapest for Paris in 1948 and came under the influence of the Surrealist movement. He soon abandoned representation, in favour of process-driven abstraction. In 1960 he began his first pliage paintings, using the technique of folding, knotting, painting, and unfolding the canvas to develop an ‘automatic’ process, producing striking paintings that juxtaposed the naked material against bright colours. In the face of his success with this method, he withdrew from the art world and ceased painting in 1982. In 2003 he gave a collection of his work to the Centre Pompidou, which featured in a retrospective there in 2013.