Olivier Debré, born on 14 April 1920 in Paris, where he died on 1 June 1999, was a French painter and a major representative of lyrical abstraction. 

He was born into a family of doctors and politicians. He painted and drew from childhood, and then turned to a career as an architect. In 1938, he graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the architecture section and attended Le Corbusier's studio. However, he decided to devote himself to painting. His pictorial expression, initially inspired by impressionism, evolved towards more airy compositions with large coloured surfaces, making Debré one of the representatives of gestural abstraction. 

In 1940, he exhibited regularly at the Salons des Surindépendants, de Mai and d'Automne.

In 1941, when some of his paintings were shown at Georges Aubry's gallery, he met Picasso. The repeated visits to Picasso's studio had a decisive influence on the young painter. From then on, he sought to express his emotions without using representation. For him, the sign appears as the embodiment of emotion and thought. Although abstract, he considered that the sign did not mean anything other than reality. Signe de fveur noir (1944-1945) is a sign of Olivier Debré's transition from figuration to non-figuration. 

In 1950, Debré favoured matter and muted colours, driven by the idea of the sign as a representation of thought, he painted and sculpted the series "signes personnages", characterised by a large-scale execution using a knife, a technique similar to that of De Staël. 

In 1960, Olivier Debré returned to the landscape and found his original way. The fluidity of the material spread out in large undulating monochrome fields with punctuations of thick, coloured concretions that delimit and generate space. 

In 1979, he was appointed head of the studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

In the 1980s and 1990s Olivier Debré received several public commissions, the most important being the stage curtain for the Comédie-Française. The stage curtain for the Hong Kong Opera, commissioned by the Louis Vuitton Foundation, and the curtain for the new Shanghai Opera. He also designed sets and costumes for the Ballet "Signes" (choreographer Carolyn Carlson). 

The Olivier Debré Museum opened in Tours, France in early 2016.