Selected WorksAt Winchester Galleries on Broad Street

Opening: Saturday April 10, 2010; 2:00-4:00 p.m.

Last day of exhibition: Saturday May 29, 2010

Claude Tousignant was born in 1932 in Montreal and has lived and worked there for most of his life.  His practice, internationally recognized for its unique and significant contribution to the history of art, is essentially about colour interaction and monochrome.  The many important exhibitions devoted to Tousignant's work include a mid-career retrospective that opened in 1973 at the National Gallery of Canada (before travelling to twelve other major centres) and the very large and widely acclaimed retrospective held last year at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal.

Among the key paintings in this exhibition at the Winchester Galleries on Broad Street is Ovale #1 (1968, 44 x 144 in.), the smallest of the only five or six ovals the artist has painted, one of which is owned by the Vancouver Art Gallery.  These works employ two interlocking colour series to create a rhythmic, chromati­cally mutating field.   Also on view will be Vi-olet-Vert-Bleu-Noir #2 (1980, 2 elements,
each 66 in. diam.), a mag­nificent diptych exemplifying Tousignant's thesis that in­dividual co­lours and forms achieve their full potential through the complementarity and balance of their rela­tions with others.  The year this diptych was made — 1980 — represents a turning point in the oeuvre: monochromatic identity was becoming increasingly synonymous with the very pigment itself, anticipating the apogee to which Tousignant would take the genre.