Paul-Émile Borduas

Paul-Émile Borduas

Painter Paul-Émile Borduas was born in Sainte-Hilaire, Quebec in 1905. He gained an international reputation as a painter and is considered a renowned and celebrated figure of great influence in Quebec. During his youth, Borduas served as an apprentice for the Quebecois decorative church painter, Ozias Leduc, who convinced Borduas to enroll in the École des beaux-arts in Montreal and sent him to Paris to study at the Ateliers d’art sacré. After his studies, Borduas taught drawing and painting in primary schools in Montreal and served as a professor at the École du Meuble.

Influenced by the work of Surrealist André Breton, he created his first automatist work, Abstraction verte, in 1941. The following year, he showed forty-five Surrealist works painted in gouache at the Théâtre de l’Érmitage, Montreal that were very well received.

Borduas became the leader of the Automatistes, a group of likeminded painters who exhibited together from 1943-1947 inspired by the Surrealist movement’s interest in the subconscious. He was the main author of the group’s manifesto, Refus global (1948), which denounced old ideologies and aimed instead to open Quebec to new cultural and intellectual developments.

From 1953-1955, Borduas lived in New York where his painting practice evolved as a result of his experience with American Abstract Expressionists. At this time, he began to apply paint solely with a spatula to create more texture. 

Today, his work is on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia, and the Musée d’art contemporain and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Quebec. Borduas’ work helped shape a distinctly Canadian artistic visual identity that is remembered to this day.

Sam Borenstein

Sam Borenstein

Sam Borenstein was a Lithuanian-born Canadian Expressionist painter who immigrated with his family to Montreal, Canada in 1921. His work has been compared that of Marc Chagall and Vincent Van Gogh, though Borenstein’s oeuvre is distinct in his Surrealist flavour. Borenstein created hundreds of works over the course of his career and, although he did not find much success during his lifetime, his work has become quite desirable in the contemporary Canadian market.

During his youth, Borenstein taught himself to paint by capturing the people and places surrounding him with exaggerated brushstrokes and vivid colours, working directly on his canvas with a palette knife. He aimed to paint the essence of things such as responses to the weather as well as emotions associated with people and places. His work is at once personal and expressive of universal human experience.

His work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Manitoba, the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, the National Portrait Gallery in England, as well as the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in Quebec, the last of which held a retrospective of his work in 2005. His daughter, Joyce Borenstein, a filmmaker and artist herself, created a short film of his life titled, Colours of My Father: A Portrait of Sam Borenstein (1991), which won nine international awards.

Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer known for his expansive industrial landscape photographs taken from aerial perspective. His work explores the systems humans have imposed on the environment as well as the negative consequential impact the planet has suffered as a result. Burtynsky has photographed a number of series of industrial sites in Canada, the United States, China, India, Europe, and Australia.

Born in 1955 in St. Catharines, Ontario, Burtynsky received his Bachelor of Applied Arts in Photography and Media Studies from Ryerson University in 1982. Only three years later in 1985, he founded Toronto Image Works, a darkroom, rental facility and training center available to all levels of the art community in Toronto.

Burtynsky has built an international reputation for himself in the art world. His work is in over sixty major museums including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, and the Tate in London. In addition to producing photographs, the artist is an active lecturer. He has spoken at many institutions across North America as well as for the TED conference. His work has been published in National Geographic, the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and Canadian Art, among many others.

Jack Hamilton Bush

Jack Hamilton Bush

Jack Hamilton Bush was one of the first Canadian artists to garner international recognition. He was raised in London, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec. Bush initially worked as a commercial artist, but was inspired to pursue a career in the fine arts when he encountered the work of the Group of Seven.

During the 1930s in Toronto, Bush studied painting at the Ontario College of Art where he zealously painted landscapes. During this time, he developed his own unique style that employed a thoughtful arrangement of form and colour. He applied vibrantly coloured bars, and other geometric shapes with assertive motions, into compositions that were inspired by nature. These works retained a feeling of the landscape despite being rendered with abstracted motifs. Bush initially painted with oil paints, then acrylic and, later on, gouache as he strived to create strong, opaque imagery.

Dissatisfied with Canada’s detachment from the international art scene, he soon became a founding member of the Painters Eleven, a group of Toronto-based Abstract painters. In the late 1950s, the Painters Eleven and Bush made many connections in New York, including a friendship with revered art critic, Clement Greenberg.

In the 1960s, his international success grew. Notably, his work was included in Greenberg’s Post Painterly Abstraction 1964 exhibition and he was chosen as one of the artists to represent Canada at the São Paulo Biennial in 1967. Major retrospectives of his work have been held at the Art Gallery of Ontario (1976) in Toronto and the National Gallery of Canada (2014) in Ottawa. His work can be found in their permanent collections as well as in those of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in Quebec, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in Massachusetts, and the Tate in London.

Emily Carr

Emily Carr

Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer best known for her vibrant paintings of British Colombia’s nature and Indigenous communities. In addition to painting, Carr wrote extensively about her indigenous friends and studies. Carr is widely considered a national icon and one of the most important Canadian artists for her ingenuity and independence.

She was born in Victoria, British Columbia in 1871. After the death of her parents in 1890, she attended the San Francisco Art Institute for two years. In 1898, she made her first sketches and paintings of aboriginal villages inspired by the Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast. In 1899, she traveled to London to study at the Westminster School of Art and in 1910 she went to Paris to study at the Académie Colarossi. While in France, she met the painter Harry Gibb, whose use of distortion and vibrant colours would significantly influence Carr’s work.

In 1927, she was invited to include her works in an exhibition on West Coast aboriginal art at the National Gallery in Ottawa, an exhibit that later traveled to Toronto and Montreal. It was at this exhibition where Carr met the members of the Group of Seven, individuals who were considered pioneers of Canadian Modernism and inspired her to continue creating and innovating. In the 1930s, she showed her work in other major Canadian cities as well as in London, Paris, Washington, D.C., and Amsterdam. In 1952, her work was chosen to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale alongside artists David Milne, Goodridge Roberts, and Alfred Pellan. Later in life, she shifted her focus from aboriginal themes to landscapes, in particular, scenes of dreamlike forests.

Carr’s work is housed in a number of prestigious national museums, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Her appeal expands beyond Canada’s borders as well, evidenced in the subject of a solo exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery held in London (2014-2015) that focused on her work, and in an exhibition that was part of DOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany.

Alexander Colville

Alexander Colville

Alexander Colville was a Canadian painter whose works captured a number of subjects in New Brunswick including the ocean, boats, people, and the natural expanse of the province. His ordinary subjects were rendered in a static, slightly eerie style, echoing elements of Surrealism.

Colville was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1920. In 1942, he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick and, shortly after, enlisted in the Canadian Army infantry during World War II. After two years in the military, Colville was employed as a war artist. With his drawings he captured the horrors of the war in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, he returned to New Brunswick and taught in the Fine Arts Department at his alma mater, Mount Allison University. In 1963, he left teaching to devote his time to painting and printmaking full-time in his studio.

During his career, Colville exhibited extensively across Canada and abroad. In 1966, along with artists Yves Gaucher and Sorel Etrog, his work represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. His works can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the MoMA in New York, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.

Maurice Cullen

Maurice Cullen

Maurice Cullen was a Canadian landscape painter known for his winter landscape paintings. He was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1866 but was mostly raised in Montreal, Quebec. In 1889, he travelled to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Julian where he learned the traditional French style of Academic painting. While in Paris, Cullen discovered and was greatly inspired by the work of the Impressionists. During World War I, Cullen was assigned to be an official war artist to document the horrors of battle.

Cullen’s landscape paintings maintained the tradition of both European and Canadian painting, but employed more luminous, Impressionistic colours. Cullen’s Impressionist influence helped inspire the next generation of Canadian artists, having taught from 1891 to 1920 at the Art Association of Montreal. He was the first Canadian to be elected an associate member of the Société national des Beaux-Arts, Paris. In 1899, he was also elected to be an associate member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Jean Philippe Dallaire

Jean Philippe Dallaire

Jean Philippe Dallaire was a Canadian painter known for his festive imagery and macabre characters often painted in his highly original style reminiscent of both Surrealism and Cubism. During his artistic career, Dallaire rarely paid attention to trends and developed his own unique practice. In contrast to the cheerful colours of his palette, Dallaire’s work often features visibly troubled subjects affected by fear, madness, and violence.

Dallaire was born in Hull, Quebec in 1916. He studied at the Central Technical School in Toronto from 1932-1935, at the École des Beaux-Arts, Montreal and at the Ateliers d’Art Sacré, Paris in 1938. While in France, young Dallaire encountered the works of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Joan Miró all of whom strongly influenced his art practice. Although technically trained, Dallaire is noted for his self-education and originality.

It is believed that the artist’s frequent employment of dark imagery stems from his experiences during World War II. While living in France in 1940, Dallaire and his wife were placed in the German internment camp, Saint-Denis. Although his wife was released after six months, Dallaire was forced to endure four years of imprisonment.

After the war, Dallaire briefly returned to Canada and later settled in Vence, France. He worked for the École des Beaux-Arts, Quebec from 1946-1952 and for the National Film Board from 1952-1958, where he worked in animation. During this period, he also received numerous commissions for murals, as well as an order to decorate the interior of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.

Dallaire’s work has been exhibited internationally in Paris, São Paolo, Seattle, and San Francisco. Retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held at the Musée d’Art contemporain in Montreal and the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec in Quebec City. In 1957, he participated in the Biennial of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. More recently, from 2005-2008, a traveling exhibition Dallaire, Illustrateurs, Extraits des séries historiques was organized by the city of Gatineau, Quebec and its municipal gallery.

Jessica Eaton

Jessica Eaton

Born in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1977, Jessica Eaton currently resides and works in Montreal, Quebec. She is a contemporary artist who has developed a unique experimental approach to photography which questions the very nature of the medium itself and aims to challenge human perception. 

Eaton received her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver where she specialized in photography. She first received international acclaim through her series entitled, Cubes for Albers and LeWitt (known as cfaal), which comprised of geometric photographs that deconstruct her studio practice. Her artistic method involves taking multiple in-camera exposures of common studio supplies then manipulating the photographs using various methods such as colour-separation filtering and in-camera masking. The result renders her images with an aesthetic reminiscent more of paintings and drawings of hard-geometric abstraction than the photographs of traditional studio work. In this way, Eaton’s images portray alternate visions of reality that the naked-eye does not have the ability to perceive. 

Eaton’s photographs have been included in many solo and group exhibitions both in Canada and abroad in the United States and the United Kingdom. Her work is included in various prestigious collections, most notably in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Musée d’art Contemporarain de Montréal, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the TD Bank Group Collection and the RBC Royal Bank Collection, among many others. 

Most recently, she was awarded with a fellowship at the Guggenheim in 2019.

Marc-Aurèle Fortin

Marc-Aurèle Fortin

Marc Aurèle Fortin was a Canadian painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. During his lifetime, he produced an estimated ten thousand paintings, many of which have been lost over the years. He is known for his decorative, colourful, and picturesque landscapes. He often painted leafy trees, rustic homes, hay carts, and scenes of Montreal featuring isolated human figures overshadowed by nature.

Fortin was born in Sainte-Rose, Quebec in 1888 and studied in Montreal under Ludger Larose and Edmond Dyonnet and at the Art Institute of Chicago. During his studies in Chicago, the works of Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, and Jean-François Millet served as great sources of inspiration.

He captured scenes of Montreal, Sainte-Rose, Quebec City, the Île d’Orléans, Charlevoix, and the Gaspé. Fortin traveled to France several times during his career to draw and paint. He experimented with printmaking, watercolour, oil paint, and pastels. He also often painted on black and grey surfaces to achieve more luminous colour.

Fortin’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions throughout Canada and abroad. Solo exhibitions were held at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreeal, the Musée des beaux-arts du Québec in Quebec City, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and in Almelo, Netherlands. In 1938, Fortin won the Jessie Dow prize from the Art Association of Montreal and, the following year, was awarded a bronze medal at the New York World’s Fair.