Marcel Barbeau

Marcel Barbeau was born in Montreal on February 18, 1925. He studied with Paul-Émile Borduas at École du Meuble in Montreal and then, between 1945 and 1953, attended his personal workshop where he met the young intellectuals who formed the Group of Automatists. He participated in all the activities of this movement between 1946 and 1955, including his first two exhibitions of April 1946 and February 1947, and signed the manifesto Refus Global in 1948. Since then, he has questioned his achievements. Constantly in search of new forms and new modes of expression, guided by a repeated impulse of "passage to the limit" according to Charles Delloye. In this sense, he is fully an "exploratory" artist, according to the term of the poet Claude Gauvreau. Nomadic by his curiosity of the other, Vancouver, Paris, New York, Southern California were alternately his home ports, although he always maintained deep ties with Quebec where he returned for long annual stays. Back in Montreal in 2008, he died on January 2, 2016, having continued to practice his art in his final weeks, as he wished.

Submitted by MARK LEIBNER