Marcel Barbeau
(1925–)
(–2016)
Marcel Barbeau
1925–2016
Born in Montréal, Marcel Barbeau (1925–2016) was a Canadian abstract expressionist and an action painter. Barbeau made art continuously for 65 years and lived and worked in Canada, Europe, and the United States. Barbeau was part of the Abstract Expressionist, Op, Minimalist, and Kinetic art movements.
In the early 1940s, Barbeau studied painting and sculpture at the École du Meuble in Montréal under Paul-Emile Borduas. He was a classmate with Jean-Paul Riopelle and seven other young intellectuals and artists, which later formed as the Les Automatistes. In 1948, this group of artistic dissidents published the celebrated manifesto Les refus global.
Barbeau’s works translate contemporary artistic trends into his mutations, he broadens his art with new visions inspired by science and new technologies. His work has been included in every major exhibition featuring Les Automatistes since the 1940s. In 2013, his work Nadja (1946) was included in the exhibition “Art in War, France 1938-1947, from Picasso to Dubuffet” at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris and at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The same year, he was awarded a Governor General of Canada Award in Media and Visual Arts; the Prix Louis-Philipe-Hébert bestowed by the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal; and the Prix Borduas, the Québec government award in the visual arts.