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.

Jim Dine

Jim Dine

Jim Dine is an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, poet, and conceptual performance artist. His artwork employs the use of nostalgic motifs, including Pinocchio, heart shapes, bathrobes, and tools that are both autobiographical and that focus on themes of personal identity and memory.

Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935. He studied at the University of Cincinnati and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. In 1957, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio University. He moved to New York the following year and became known for his critical role in a group of artists who initiated ‘Happenings’, which is a genre of performance art that challenges the elitism of Abstract Expressionism.

Dine believes in the power of simple images because their familiarity is accessible and relatable to any viewer. Although he uses straightforward and popular imagery, Dine resists his connection to Pop Art. Instead, he insists that his work is an extension of the work put forth by artists who question the power of iconic symbols rather than exploit them, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

In addition to his numerous international exhibitions, his work is included in the public collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, the British Museum in London, England, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the MoMA in New York, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Tate Modern in London, England, the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawai’i. Today Dine lives in New York, Paris, and Walla Walla, Washington.

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet was a French painter known for founding the Art Brut movement (a French term that literally translates to ‘raw art’). This term was used to describe artworks made outside the realm of academic tradition, usually in reference to graffiti or naïve art – also called ‘outside art’. Dubuffet concerned himself with anti-culture and anti-art, dismissing conventional aesthetics. He challenged beauty standards, customary academic painting, and notions of realism. Refusing to believe in the difference between the beautiful and the ugly, Dubuffet deliberately chose to evoke the grotesque. 

Dubuffet was born in Le Havre, France in 1901. Though well educated, he rejected the notion of formal institutions, preferring to study on his own. In 1918, he moved to Paris and studied for a short time at the Académie Julian until he withdrew after a brief six months. It was not until 1942 that Dubuffet decided to return to painting. He was heavily influenced by the paintings of Jean Fautrier, a painter of Tachism (or Art Informel). Dubuffet used a similar stylistic approach by applying texture to paint with the combination of sand, gravel, tar, and straw.

While post-war Paris favoured artwork that reaffirmed old values, Dubuffet preferred to create ‘low-brow’, childlike imagery that satirized high art. Opposed to an intellectual approach, Dubuffet sought out the work of children and the mentally ill. He admired their unrepressed style with which they could freely experiment, unrestricted by rigid art theories and normative trends.

His early work is comprised of portraits of everyday people with exaggerated, grotesque features. During the later years of his career, Dubuffet experimented with unusual mediums such as with ballpoint and felt tip pens. He also began to embrace the Surrealist idea of automatic drawing as a means to tap into the subconscious. Dubuffet used this technique to create the graphic style of his later series, Hourloupe (1962), which were comprised of clean black lines forming cells filled with unmixed color that showcased the contrast between physical and mental representation. He considered these works of art to be in their purest form. They would continue to occupy him for the next several decades.

Throughout his career, his work was exhibited in numerous exhibitions and retrospectives internationally. Today, his work can be found in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the MoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, and the Tate Modern in London, England. The Foundation Jean Dubuffet in Paris, France continues to actively collect and exhibit his work.

Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas was a German-born American abstract painter. He grew up in Berlin in 1915 and studied there before fleeing Nazi Germany to settle in New York City in 1939. In the 1950s, he began creating Abstract Expressionist paintings while sharing a studio with fellow painter, Helen Frankenthaler. During this time, he exhibited in various galleries throughout Manhattan, eventually attracting the attention of renowned art critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg included Dzubas’ work in his 1964 exhibition, Post-Painterly Abstraction.

Dzubas created his works by applying thick layers of paint over washes, which were rubbed into un-primed canvases. For his large-scale works, he experimented with various techniques to apply colour, such as staining and brushing with acrylic paints as well as with Magna paint, a brand of acrylic resin paint.

During his career, Dzubas taught at Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Cornell University. He won the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 and 1968 as well as the National Council on the Arts Award that same year. Additionally, he had more than sixty solo exhibitions around the world. His work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, and numerous other institutions across the United States.

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.

Janet Fish

Janet Fish

Janet Fish in an American realist painter known for her large-scale still-life paintings. She often paints glass, plastic-wrapped fruit, or mirrors, paying particular attention to the depiction of transparency and reflections of light.

Fish was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1938 and was raised in Bermuda. She studied printmaking and sculpture at Smith College, receiving her Bachelor of Arts in 1960. For her Master of Fine Arts, Fish attended Yale University from 1960-1963, where she studied under Alex Katz and alongside fellow prolific students such as Chuck Close and Richard Serra. In 1967, she had her first solo show at Fairleigh Dickinson University and her first full exhibition shortly after in New York City in 1969.

Fish currently lives and works in New York City and Middletown Springs, Vermont.
In addition to her art practice, she has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons The New School for Design, Syracuse University, and the University of Chicago. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, as well as numerous other institutions throughout the United States.

Günther Förg

Günther Förg

Günther Förg was a German painter, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer born in Füssen, Germany in 1952. He had a strong interest in modernism and developed a multi-disciplinary practice that combined artistic mediums and styles. His works recall Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly, among others.

Förg studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1973 to 1979. It was there that he began to explore abstraction and minimalism, two aesthetics that would go on to greatly influence his body of work. Förg was also influenced by architectural styles like the Bauhaus, which favoured geometric shapes like rectangles and spheres, without elaborate decorations.

Förg had his first solo exhibition at the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery in Munich (1980) with a series of monochrome paintings. In 1992, he was represented at the Documenta IX, and in 1996, he won the prestigious Wolfgang Hahn Prize, awarded annually by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

His work has been exhibited internationally and is housed in the permanent collections of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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.

Sam Francis

Sam Francis

Sam Francis was an American painter and printmaker recognized as one of the most influential postwar American artists. He was born in 1923 in San Mateo, California and attended the University of California, Berkeley as a pre-med student. His studies were halted when he joined the Army Air Corps during World War II. Due to an illness caused by spinal tuberculosis, he left his military service and was hospitalized for extended periods of time over the next several years. It was confined to his hospital bed where he found his passion for painting.

After his recovery, he experimented with abstract and figurative works in the San Francisco area, inspired in part by the artistic trends dominating the 1940s – Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. He returned to Berkeley and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1949 and with a Master of Arts in 1950. After finishing his education, he moved to Paris where he worked throughout the 1950s while frequently travelling to the South of France, Mexico City, Tokyo, Bern, and New York. While in Paris, his style became associated with Tachisme, a French form of abstract painting with an intuitive form of expression. A Time Magazine feature in 1956 described Francis as one of the most popular American painters in Paris at the time.

Francis’ art has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. His work can be found in international museum collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA in New York, NY, the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, France, and the Idemitsu Museum of Arts in Tokyo, Japan. During his career, he had more than one hundred solo exhibitions and, since his death, over ninety more. Today, the Sam Francis Foundation in California continues to organize exhibitions as well as donate artworks, manage archives, and provide education to the public about his art to preserve Francis’ legacy.

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler was an artist working in the mid 20th century whose impact on artworld has been momentous. She made great contributions to the Abstract Expressionist movement and is praised for working as a woman in a predominantly male profession. Most famously, Frankenthaler invented the soak-stain technique of painting which consists of pouring thin paint directly onto unprimed canvases. This technique allows the paint to pool and seep into different parts of the work. The end result are colourful and raw artworks evocative of natural phenomena. Her soak-stained technique was instrumental in the development of Color Field painting which was practiced by many of her contemporaries including Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. This painting style has continued to define mid-century American painting. 

 Frankenthaler was born in 1928 and raised in New York City. She graduated from Bennington College in 1949 and began her professional career a year later. Her painting, Beach (1950) was selected for the exhibition, Fifteen Unknowns: Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery, which catapulted her career. She was the subject of major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Frankenthaler continued to reinvent the ways art is produced and experimented with a variety of mediums such as ceramics, sculpture, tapestry and print making, which she explored until her death in 2011. 

 Frankenthaler’s work is frequently re-examined throughout the artworld internationally. She is praised for her dynamism, her unique artistic methods and for her significance within feminism’s intersection with art history. Most recently, her work was presented in the MoMA’s exhibition, Making Space: Women and Artists and Abstraction (2017).