Pierre Gauvreau - Canadian Avant-Garde Art

 

 Pierre Gauvreau (1922 –2011)was a Québécois painter who has also worked in film and television productions.He was born in Montreal, and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, today part of UQAM.
"Gauvreau was a signatory of the famous manifesto, Refus Global (Total Refusal), formed and published in 1948 by the Automatistes (1940s) and led by Borduas. The manifesto rejected formal academic strains of teaching and the Automatistes were heavily influenced by Surrealism and automatism. Of all the members, Gauvreau's favouritism towards a subconscious approach to painting: the freshness, the immediacy, and the freedom, solidified his work as "avant-garde". In 1977, after a hiatus of more than ten years during which his energies were absorbed by film and television, Gauvreau's colours intensified, his canvases grew larger, and he began working in a style that combined his earlier gestural brushwork with shapes and techniques associated usually with colour field and hard-edged painting: large areas of bright colour, geometric shapes, and the use of tape and collage to give sharply designated edges. Luxe, calme, et volupte" (Luxury, calm, and sensual pleasure) is the earliest example in this Retrospective.(gevik.com)

 

 

Gracia Barrios Rivadeneira

 

 Gracia Barrios Rivadeneira (1927 – 2020) was a Chilean painter and the winner of the 2011 National Prize for Plastic Arts.
The work of Gracia Barrios focuses on "human activity in everyday life." Although she initially opted for figurative painting, towards the 1960s she changed to a more informal style, called "informal realism" by the artist herself. With this, Barrios alluded to the man "by means of the monumentality of torsos, heads, and maternities, expressing also the direct approach with the American continent and its people." Some of the themes she tackled in her paintings were war, indigence, and exile.In addition to using oil and acrylic paints, the artist experimented with natural elements such as earth and clay in order to give greater density to her works.Wikipedia 

 

 

James Havard - Abstract illusionism

 

 

James Havard (1937 - 2020) was an American painter and sculptor. He was a pioneer of abstract illusionism in the 1970s. In the 1980s he changed his style into a form of abstract expressionism influenced by Native American and tribal cultures as well as outsider art. Drawing inspiration from outsider and tribal art, Havard stands within a tradition that includes such notable artists as Paul Gauguin, Cy Twombly, Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Joseph Beuys. James Havard has been producing paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures that defy categorization, ranging from abstraction and illusionism to figuration, combining and pioneering styles, and drawing from indigenous and tribal cultures and art history to create an exuberant visual language at once hermetic and universal. He first gained recognition in the 1970s for pioneering an approach to painting, known as “Abstract Illusionism,” in which individual brushstrokes and abstract forms were shaded to appear three-dimensional. By the late 1980s, he turned to figuration, populating his compositions with radically pared-down, roughly hewn male and female figures inspired by Native American, African tribal, and pre-Colombian art, cave painting, and children’s drawings, and recalling Art Brut. Raw, expressive, and, ultimately, enigmatic, these figures also appear in Havard’s boxed collages and sculptures—a medium he began exploring in 2002.

 

ORNA ADORAM

 

 Contemporary Israeli Artist
"All my works are originals multi-layered acrylic on canvas combines the practical world of industrial architecture recycled materials, with symbols and concepts from the spiritual world. All are transformed together onto the canvas. "(ORNA ADORAM) 

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