Zoya Niedermann

Zoya Niedermann

Zoya Niedermann is a Canadian artist known for her bronze sculpture depicting architectural elements that incorporate the human form. She fuses the city’s landscape of geometric planes, arches, and doorways together with organic figures, literally connecting mankind with his urban surroundings. 

Niedermann was born in Montreal in 1954. Her grandmother emigrated to Canada from the Ukraine, and her father, from Belarus, was a mechanical engineer who worked at Canadair after the Second World War before pursuing his passion of photography.  She inherited his aesthetics in composition and balance of space.

Niedermann studied at Sir George Williams University and the Fine Arts School of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In 1993 she won the Hakone Open-Air Museum price representing Canada at the Fujisanki Biennale in Japan, alongside artists Joel Shapiro and Magdalena Abakanowicz. She has sculptures in prestigious private collections world wide including that of Lady Victoria de Rothschild, SNC-Lavalin, the George Bernard Shaw Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the University of Windsor Library, Utsukushi-ga-hara Open-Air Museum in Japan, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

She works in Canada and travels to Italy where her bronzes are cast in foundries that Botero, Bernini, and Boccioni have used for centuries.

Alfred Pellan

Alfred Pellan

Alfred Pellan was a Canadian artist whose practice explored painting, illustration, theatre, costume design, and printmaking. He was greatly influenced by European art, particularly the Fauvists, Surrealists and Cubists; he sought to expose elements of these avant-garde movements to the Canadian art scene.

Pellan was born in Quebec City in 1906. In 1926, he graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts de Québec. His first work sold was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada when he was only seventeen. In 1926, he traveled to Paris to study at the École national supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where he incorporated his newfound Fauvist influence into his painting practice.

After returning to Quebec, Pellan settled in Montreal and taught at the École des Beaux- Arts. During the 1940s, he illustrated books, designed theatre costumes, and became involved in printmaking. He became every more interested in Surrealism and Cubism, evident in his adoption of more, vivid, complex, and textured compositions in his paintings. His still life works were created in a mosaic-like surface and were animated with dynamic, fluid lines.

The artist returned to Paris in 1955 when the Musée National d’Art Moderne held an exhibition of more than one hundred of his works. He was the first Canadian to have a solo exhibition at this institution. During his lifetime, Pellan was awarded numerous awards and honours for his significant contribution to Canadian art. Today, his work is held in many prestigious public and private collections across the country and abroad.

William Perehudoff

William Perehudoff

William Perehudoff was a Canadian painter who, throughout his five-decade career, made important contributions to the development of Color Field painting in Canada with his vibrant, abstract works. Inspired by the theories of art critic Clement Greenberg, Perehudoff dedicated his artistic practice to the exploration of non-referential abstraction.

Perehudoff was born in 1919 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and was raised on his family’s farm where he spent the majority of his life. He studied abroad at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Centre from 1948-1949 and later in New York. In the 1950s, Perehudoff began experimenting with bold, colourful abstraction, a style he continued to modify throughout his career. His early works were reminiscent of the Saskatchewan landscapes, represented by broad horizontal bands of colour.

The artist was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 1994 and became a member of the Order of Canada in 1999. A travelling retrospective of his work, The Optimism of Colour, took place in 2011 and was exhibited in various cities throughout the country. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Canada Council Art Bank in Ottawa, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, among others.

Jean Paul Riopelle

Jean Paul Riopelle

Jean-Paul Riopelle was one of the first Canadian artists to achieve notable international recognition, considered by many to be one of the most important Canadian artists of the postwar, twentieth century. As an Automatist, he was one of the original signatories of the Refus Global, along with Pauk-Émile Borduas. Extremely prolific, Riopelle produced over six thousand works, including more than two thousand paintings, throughout his career.

Riopelle was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1923 and began taking drawing lessons at the young age of ten. In 1942, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal. Inspired by André Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, he experimented with non- representational painting. In 1947, Riopelle moved to Paris where he associated himself with the Surrealists. His first solo show took place in 1949 at the Galerie La Dragonne, a popular Surrealist meeting place in Paris.

Riopelle kept a studio near Giverny, France in the 1960s alongside American painter Joan Mitchell, with whom he had a romantic relationship with for the next two decades. During this time, he experimented with other mediums including ink on paper, watercolour, lithography, collage, and sculpture. In the 1980s, Riopelle moved back to Quebec and established his studio in Estérel. Here, he experimented with representational subject matter and aerosol spray cans.

Riopelle’s style is distinguished by a thick layering of hastily applied paint, a technique he employed in order to complete a painting in one session. He prepared all of his colours beforehand and applied them onto large canvases with a palette knife, a spatula, or a trowel. Depending on the gloss finish he applied, light reflects off the surface of the paints in different directions and with varying degrees of intensity. 

Riopelle has received many accolades for his significant contribution to Canadian art history. His work received an Honourable Mention at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1952 and his work was chosen to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and, again, in 1962. He participated in the Younger European Painters exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1953 and received an Honourable Mention at the Guggenheim International Award exhibition in 1958. Moreover, retrospectives of his work have been held at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec in Quebec City, the Fondation Maeght near Saint Paul-de-Vence, the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, and at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne.

William Ronald

William Ronald

William Ronald was an influential Canadian painter, best known as one of the founding members of the artistic group, Painters Eleven, a Toronto-based group of Abstract artists active during the 1950s, partaking in their first exhibition of 1954. His abstract compositions are characterized by their spontaneity and energy, which he achieved through his particular method of applying paint in an automatic, unplanned manner.

Ronald was born in Stratford, Ontario in 1926. After graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, he started producing abstract works. Feeling shunned by the Toronto art-scene, he worked for the Robert Simpson Co., a department store where he paired abstract paintings with furniture displays with the intention of persuading the public to embrace non-representational art. With Toronto’s growing resentment towards abstract art, Ronald moved to New York City in 1952 where he shared a studio with Frank Stella and studied at the Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Arts. In 1957, he had his first exhibition at the Samuel Kootz Gallery where his work was well received by art critics and collectors alike.

In addition to painting, Ronald was a successful journalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and was a columnist for the Toronto Telegram. He hosted TV and radio variety shows including, As it Happens (1969-1972) and The Umbrella (1966-1967). Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, Ronald moved back to Canada and actively painted in various cities across the province of Ontario. He enjoyed painting in public venues, often hiring strippers to dance around him while he painted. He continued to paint until his death – literally – as he suffered a heart attack while painting a canvas 1998. He named the work in question, Heart Attack, before passing away several days later.

Ronald was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and his work is part of collections at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, the MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, among numerous others.

Erin Shirreff

Erin Shirreff

Erin Shirreff is a Canadian artist who was born in 1975 in Kelowna, British Columbia. She has an interdisciplinary art practice with a focus on photography, sculpture and video. Her work depicts semi-abstract, geometric forms that emphasize the formal characteristics – such as volume, shape and mass – of her artistic subjects.

In 1998 Shirreff received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria in Visual Arts. In 2005, she went on to receive her Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art. Shirreff is interested in the relationship between two and three dimensional spaces. She uses flat images and works on paper to represent architectural structures and sculptures that appear flattened or two dimensional.

In 2005, Shirreff received The Hayward Prize for Fine Arts from The Austrian-American Foundation. In 2011, Shirreff was the recipient of both The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. She has also won the Aimia/AGO Photography Prize from the Art Gallery of Ontario. Shirreff’s work is included in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.

Shirreff currently lives and works in New York.

Claude Tousignant

Claude Tousignant

Claude Tousignant is a Canadian artist whose work is considered to have been integral to the development of Geometric Abstraction. In the 1950s, he was associated with the Modern art movement, les Plasticiens, a group who celebrated an orderly style of painting devoid of spontaneity.

Tousignant was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1932. Encouraged by his family to pursue a career in art, he attended the School of Art and Design at the Musée des Beaux-Arts from 1948-1951. He also spent time abroad in Paris studying at the Académie Ranson, but ultimately returned to Montreal in 1952.

Tousignant is best known for his circle paintings composed of large, target-like rings of various colours that explore the effects of optical illusions and colour studies. His circular motifs create vibrating, rhythmic forms with sharp clean edges that aim to challenge the senses. His intention was to create purely abstract works that ensured minimal interference between the painting and the viewer’s experience of colour.

His work has been shown in exhibitions internationally and is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Musée d’art contemporain and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec in Quebec City, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and many more. Tousignant continues to explore optics and sensory perception in his painting practice.

Harold Town

Harold Town

Harold Town was an Abstract painter who was a member of the Painters Eleven, the Toronto-based group of Abstract artists active during the 1950, and whose work contributed significantly to the development of Modernism in the Canadian art scene. He is also remembered as a talented printmaker and illustrator whose early works appeared in Mayfair and Maclean’s magazines.

Town was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1924 where he studied at the Western Technical-Commercial School and the Ontario College of Art. As a student, the works of Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning as well as East Asian ceramics and antiques from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt were of great inspiration for him. Throughout his career, Town was also influenced by different global cultures and many historical references. He also experimented with a variety of contemporary and historical painting methods. He was somewhat of an unpredictable painter whose body of work evolved from abstraction to more conceptually grounded art later in his career.

During his lifetime, he received many honours and accolades for his artistic achievements. He was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1968. Additionally, he was chosen to represent Canada, along with artists Jack Shadbolt and Louis Archambault, at the Venice Biennale in 1956 and, again, in 1964 with artist Elza Mayhew. Town also represented Canada in the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1957 and 1961. Today, his work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among many other institutions across the globe.