Claude Tousignant retrospective at the MAC
February 5 to April 26, 2009

Montréal, December 2, 2008. From February 5 to April 26, 2009, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal presents a major retrospective devoted to Claude Tousignant, a leading light of abstraction. The exhibition covers the artist’s career of fifty-plus years through ninety works (paintings and sculptures), from his famous Monochrome orangé and his Transformateurs chromatiques, Gongs, Accélérateurs chromatiques, Diptyques circulaires, Polychromes and Monochromes series to his most recent pieces.

Encompassing the range of modernist expression, Tousignant’s pictorial practice is unique in the history of Canadian art. Throughout his career, the artist has shown an unwavering commitment to abstract art. In the mid-1950s, he broke away from the expressionist aesthetic of the time and began developing a form of abstraction based on the idea of painting as “pure sensation.”

From the start, Tousignant was associated with the second generation of the Montréal movement known as the Plasticians, who advocated an abstract, geometric art. He explored the expressive power of colour the most rigorously and boldly of all this group. Both a painter and a sculptor, Tousignant has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the major Canadian museums, and his target paintings and large-scale compositions have become an essential reference in Canadian abstract painting. He was born in 1932 in Montréal, where he continues to live and work.

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Source and information                     
Danielle Legentil                                                   
Public Relations Coordinator            
Tél. : 514 847-6232
danielle.legentil@macm.org