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Françoise Sullivan performing Danse dans
la neige, February 1948. Photo: Maurice Perron. Collection of Musée
National des beaux-arts du Québec. |
The Art Gallery of Alberta
2 Sir Winston
Churchill SquareEdmonton, AB $40 General Public / $25 AGA Members, Students, and Seniors
Tickets include access to the exhibition The Automatiste Revolution
Saturday, October 13, 2012 at 2 pm
Talk | 2 pm
Performance | 3:30 pm
Join exhibition curator, Roald Nasgaard, for an engaging conversation with award-winning author Ray Ellenwood and Françoise Sullivan, an original member of the Automatistes. A dance program choreographed by Sullivan and performed by Ginette Boutin follows the talk.
The Automatistes were the first artists to bring modernist painting to Canada and the first Canadian artists to embrace avant-garde gestural abstraction. Gathered under the leadership of Paul-Émile Borduas in the early 1940s, they were inspired by stream-of-consciousness writings of the time and approached their works through an exploration of the subconscious. They published Refus global (Total Refusal) in 1948 and it became one of the pillars of the Quiet Revolution, a period of intense change in Quebec. Refus global was an anti-religious and anti-establishment manifesto—one of the most controversial artistic and social documents in modern Quebec.
The Automatistes were not solely painters, but also included dancers, playwrights, poets, critics, and choreographers. After twenty years of challenging the politically and religiously repressive Quebec society, the Automatiste group disbanded in 1960 after the death of Borduas.
Françoise Sullivan is represented by Corkin Gallery. For inquiries about works available by Sullivan, please contact the gallery.
