GUIDO MOLINARI - PAINTINGS: 1951- 2001

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Guido Molinari, "MUTATION ROUGE-OCRE," 1964

acrylic on canvas, 68" x 60", (Estate # G.M.-T - 1964-05)

Opening: Thursday, October 12, 2017 5:00 - 8:00 PM

Guest Speaker: Yvon Brindamour - Member of The Molinari Foundation

The Paul Kuhn Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of 28 paintings by the late artist Guido Molinari. This exhibition is organized in partnership with The Molinari Foundation and includes paintings from 1951-2001.

The Guido Molinari Foundation is a vital Montreal arts institution whose existence originates with the generous legacy from the artist. The Foundation aims to promote and perpetuate Molinari’s work by converting his last studio/residence, located in a former bank, into an exhibition, conference and documentation center where works are shown and created to advance the careers of emerging artists.

During his lifetime Molinari’s paintings, drawings and prints were exhibited at the gallery for almost a decade. It was a great privilege for us to show his work and count him as a friend. His generosity of spirit and love of art was evident immediately to anyone who knew him. He talked to anyone and everyone about art. Once he got started, he could hardly stop.

Hailed by influential art critic John Bentley Mays as "the maker of some of the most majestic and intellectually commanding canvases in the history of Canadian art,” Molinari taught at Concordia University for 27 years until he retired in 1997. His philosophy about painting was simple: "There is no such thing as a colour," he once said, "there are only colour harmonies. A given colour exists only in its shape and dimensions - and in its correlation with other colours."

At the age of fifteen, Guido Molinari enrolled in night classes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, studying with the formalist painters, Marian Scott and Gordon Webber. While Molinari never completed his formal education, his name and work are linked with the transformation of pictorial language witnessed in Quebec. Together with a small group of artists, notably Claude Tousignant, Molinari made colour painting the most important concern among serious artists in Montreal in the early 1960’s. Molinari’s work is associated with large scale American abstract expressionist paintings. Influenced by the investigations of Pollock and Mondrian, Molinari freed the surface of all perspective reference. Throughout his almost 50 year career, certain themes dominate the entire body of work: the tachist experiments of 1953-1955, the Black-and White paintings of 1956, The Plasticien works of 1958-1962, the 1963-1969 serial paintings of vertical stripes of equal width, the checkerboard and triangular works of 1969 to 1975, and the singularly coloured “Quantificateurs” of 1975 to 2004.

Guido Molinari (1933-2004) is one of the great pioneers of abstract art. His enormous body of work which includes paintings, drawings, existentialist writings and poetry earned him numerous awards notably: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Jessie Dow award (1962), The Royal Canadian Academy of Art Award (1965), The Guggenheim Fellowship Scholarship (1967), The David E. Bright Foundation Award (1968 at The Venice Biennale), and the Prix Paul Emile- Borduas (1980). After his death in 2004, Molinari's contributions were recognized with a posthumous honorary doctorate from Concordia University, Montreal.