Sorel Etrog - Sculpture

 

 "Sorel Etrog was born in 1933 in Jassy, Romania and began his artistic schooling in 1945, and then in 1950 at the Tel-Aviv School of Fine Arts following his family’s emigration. In 1958, he assembled a solo exhibition and was granted a scholarship to study at the Brooklyn Museum Art Institution. A year lated, Toronto collector Samuel J. Zacks led him to discovery the city in which he would briefly live. For four years, Sorel Etrog went back and forth to and from his New York studio before finally settling down there in 1963.
He represented Canada at the Venise Biennale in 1966. His pieces were created both for the private and public sectors: Montreal’s Expo 67, the Sn Life Centre, the Los Angeles County Museum and the Olympic Parc in Seoul, Korea. This internationally-renowned artist has his work showcased around the globe. Sorel Etrog was accepted into the Order of Canada in 1994 and was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1996.
Though bronze was Sorel Etrog’s favorite material to use, he also worked with others, including a few marble sculptures. The size of his pieces vary from small to monumental. In the last few years, the artist incorporated laminated metal sheets in his bank of materials.
Etrog was also interested in drawing (graphite, pastel and charcoal) and watercolors for both preliminary sketches and as a separate medium. As with his sculptures, the drawings explore both mechanics and biology in a harmonic way: mechanistic bodies, wrench-shaped hands, pure machines, blends, labyrinths and monsters. Like other artists form his generation, Etrog was influenced by the primitive arts and contemporary machinery. He uses them both for an infinite array of combinations."(artpublicmontreal.ca)

 

 

 

Harold Town - Canadian Abstract Expressionism Art

 Harold Barling Town (1924 – 1990) was a Canadian abstract painter. He is best known as a member of Painters Eleven a group of abstract artists active in Toronto from 1954-1960. Town coined the name of the group, which was based simply on the number of artists that were present the first meeting.He also worked as an illustrator, a profession he credited with imparting a sense of discipline that would last throughout his entire artistic career.
 “It’s easy to slip into the obvious when talking about Harold Town’s work—his ideas hit with such an impact that the viewer quickly begins babbling wildly about vigour and power and vitality… As you begin to read his paintings and collages carefully, you begin to sense behind them a master draughtsman and a graphic artist of international stature—and Town, as it happens, is both of these… Anyone who puts one word after another and calls it art criticism is tempted to make aesthetic predictions. Since Town—like all good artists—has always been unpredictable, let me skirt possible disaster by saying only that he seems to me now to be an excellent painter, and that his paintings and collages—with their swift, unexpected movements in space and their shattered, swooping shapes—are already as invigorating as anything in Canadian art.”Robert Fulford 

 

 

Jean-Paul Mousseau

Jean-Paul Mousseau (January 1, 1927 – February 7, 1991) was a Quebec artist. He was a student of Paul-Émile Borduas and a member of the Automatist school. He was a founding member of the Association on Non-Figurative Artists of Montreal. He designed murals for the Hydro-Québec building and the Peel Metro in Montreal. Jean-Paul Mousseau studied painting at the age of thirteen while at the College Notre-Dame in Montreal under Frère Jérome (1940–45). He became a student of Paul-Emile Borduas at the Ecole du Meuble, Montreal. He was a member of the group of painters known as the Automatistes. In 1948, he was one of the signatories of the Refus global manifesto.At the end of the 1950s he was one of the first Quebec artists who saw the necessity of integrating art into the urban environment. His most important contributions are original murals and other collaborations with architects. Wikipedia