André Marfaing was born in Toulouse on December 11, 1925.

In 1949, he left Toulouse, his hometown, for Paris.
Friendship with Alfred Manessier in 1951 and Pierre Soulages in 1952.
With Soulages, Marfaing shares the origins of the South-West, a passion for Romanesque art and the love of black. He definitively adopts black, a mixture of all colors and white, which is the absence of it.
“Black is for me the most natural means of expression” he confessed. 
This will be the radical way in which André Marfaing chooses to achieve an absolute, a world without reference to external nature : "reinventing painting, overturning its own borders", he said.

His first personal exhibition took place in 1958 at the Claude Bernard gallery. The following year, André Marfaing  was invited to participate in the Documenta in Kassel and in the first biennial in Paris, at the Museum of Modern Art. It was awarded by a young jury with Martin Barré, Hundertwasser, Yves Klein and Joan Mitchell. Marfaing already appears as one of the surest hopes.
In 1962, he took part in the Venice Biennale. Same year, he joined the Ariel gallery, directed by Jean Pollak, in 1967, the Birch gallery in Denmark. In the 1960s Marfaing, in the prime of life, expressed himself with vehemence and tumult.
George Boudaille (Les Lettres Françaises) describes Marfaing's work in these terms: “ the drama, the storm. It is the struggle of shadow and light…”. Indeed André Marfaing speaks of painting “as one of the adventures that allows man to emerge from chaos”. Shade, above all, like a mystery whose contours he explores. Light, as revealing, immanent and emerging from his painting.

The 70s, a new threshold is crossed by the artist in the way of counting. “I would like to say one thing totally with as few words as possible”. This tendency towards purification amplified with, in the 80s, his last paintings which could illustrate the sentence of Vladimir Nabokov: “… our existence is only the brief light of a crack between two eternities of darkness”.

André Marfaing died prematurely on March 30, 1987.

A monograph by Pierre Cabanne was published in 1991 by Editions de l'Amateur. In 2002, the national library published the catalog raisonné of the prints.

In 2008, the Berthet-Aittouarès gallery presented the exhibition André Marfaing - Paintings (1970-1986). In 2010, the gallery exhibited Les lavis de Marfaing. In the fall of 2017 presented 50 paintings and washes from 1958 to 1986.