L’Art dans la rue
ART URBAIN MONTRÉAL ENCOURAGES PROJECTS THAT PROMOTE ART IN AN URBAN CONTEXT
Its objectives: to culturally enrich and revitalize neighbourhoods and develop local culture, while also giving more visibility to our artists, exploring various artistic approaches and disciplines.
This first L'Art dans la rue exhibition features 24 X 36" paper reproductions of art prints on Montréal city poster walls, barricades and other surfaces.
ARTISTS: Peter Gnass, Danielle Lamontagne, Baudoin Wart
That is the spirit behind this first exhibition. It reaches the public where they are, in their daily life, where they can enjoy art with three artists in different disciplines in the fields of contemporary art, media art and performance art.
SUMMER 2021
PETER GNASS
Peter Gnass, Crypte en Pologne, 2008, photograph, digital print, 66 x 50 cm
PETER GNASS - BIOGRAPHY
(he)
Born in Germany in 1936, Peter Gnass currently lives and works in the regional county municipality of Nicolet-Yamaska. He purchased the beautiful Vieux théâtre de Pierreville building in 2013, which he has since made his home and where he set up a studio. He studied at the Lerchenfeld Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, later immigrating to Canada in 1957 to complete his fine arts training at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal.
Gnass is a leading figure in the Québec contemporary art world, with a multidisciplinary career spanning over 50 years. As early as 1965, at the very beginning of his career, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presented a major solo exhibition of his work. At the time, the artist was mainly focused in engraving. However, the following year, he became more interested in sculpture, which led him to be selected to exhibit his work at the Symposium de sculpture d'Alma.
As an involved artist, excellent oral speaker and great pedagogue, he was president of the Sculptors Association of Quebec, as well as professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa from 1975 to 1996.
Peter Gnass has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in many cities in Québec and Canada and around the world, in France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, the West Indies, the United States and more.
His engravings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are part of many public and corporate art collections, including those of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts , the Canada Council Art Bank, the Musée d’art de Joliette, the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, Loto Québec, the City of Montréal, the Galerie de l'UQAM and the Musée régional de Rimouski.
A substantial number of articles, works and films have been devoted to Peter Gnass whose work has significantly contributed to the advancement of contemporary art in Québec within an international context. A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, he is also the recipient of numerous artistic awards.
Long involved in the public sphere, he has created many urban art installations. One of his most impressive creations can be found at Montréal's LaSalle metro station, where he was inspired by the sunlight streaming through the roof's window. A true masterpiece, Gnass's huge inclined stainless steel structure was designed to reflect the light and movements of the crowd while integrating to the station's architecture.
Text: Céline Mayrand
DANIELLE LAMONTAGNE
Danielle Lamontagne, Rêve/ Dream, Je plonge 1, 2019, digital image, digital print, 27,61 x 32,61 cm
DREAM ..... I am woman, I am fire, I run
I am woman, I am water, I dive
I am woman, I am air, I dance
A dream never dies, only dims
For we turn down the sound of the roar
Reminding us who we are at our core
DANIELLE LAMONTAGNE - BIOGRAPHY
(she)
Danielle Lamontagne was born in 1962 in Montréal, where she currently lives and works. She holds a bachelor's degree in graphic design (1996) from Université du Québec à Montréal, where she also completed a master's degree in arts and letters in communication, with a specialization in interactive multimedia (2000).
Danielle Lamontagne is a visionary and one of the first artists to employ digital technology in her creations. She didn't hesitate to use technology in her art in the late 1990s, when the art world still underestimated the advantages of this medium. She launched her virtual interactive gallery Digital Image Art to share and promote her art and multimedia (video and sound) creations online.
Although she also creates on canvas and paper, her work is currently more focused on digital art and immersive media installations. These include projections, videos, digital images, sounds and complementary objects that conceptually represent the idea she wants to convey. Light and sound are ever-present features that she combines with multiple materials.
She continues to create with this same consistent spirit. Her rhythmic "silent poetry slams" are meant to elicit reflection or emotion. These poetic texts are the starting point for her art installations.
A socially engaged artist, she casts a lucid and critical eye on the paradoxes of life and humanity. Her work evokes a bittersweet, sometimes raw, poetry, in a socially engaged style reminiscent of performance art. The texts, at times contemplative and poetic, also perceptively highlight the absurdity of our modern society, offering up inspiration for a better world.
In the pursuit of a certain kind of beauty, the artist's work is also meant to evoke a new sense of interdependence and a shared responsibility for the well-being of all people, living things and future generations. A just, sustainable and peaceful way of living. The artist's work is a means of reconnecting with that original, sacred space within, a place of peace and balance.
BAUDOIN WART
Baudoin Wart, Spirale 1, 2011, acrylic painting, 35,56 x 45,72 cm
BAUDOIN WART - BIOGRAPHY
(he)
Born in 1960 in Coteau-du-Lac, Montérégie, Baudoin Wart lives and works in Montréal. A multidisciplinary artist, his art is driven by instinct and unbridled energy. Painting is a way for him to connect to what is most visceral, obscure or impenetrable within.
In the early 80s, as he was entering his twenties, Baudoin Wart felt a sense of urgency to shake up established ways and to transform what he saw as insipid, stagnant and morose. He had a vision of "disrupting" Montréal's grey and tidy urban landscape, but in a constructive, generative way.
Conspiring with the cultural and artistic world, which spontaneously called on his services as a singularly efficient and conscientious poster artist, and aware of the financial precariousness of that community, Baudoin Wart created his own cultural urban posting company in 1987. Since then, PUBLICITÉ SAUVAGE has continued to add colour and movement to our city's vision.
This painter and entrepreneur has never abandoned his painting as a way "to make a living." It's also an essential way for him to encounter the invisible, a way of connect to psychic immateriality and to access what is the most mysterious and impenetrable part of himself. Wart's work is introspective, both playful and perilous, and finds itself plastered on any blank surface (paper or canvas) as if it were a field of investigation into the subconscious in which the self dies only to be born again. (B.W.)
Like automatic writing, brushes, pencils and spatulas become instruments for sudden inspiration. These flashes of revelation produce shapes, textures and colours that often detach themselves from their descriptive, representational purpose. As with the Fauvist painters, this separation of conventional colours from their usual representational and realistic role accentuates the pure expression of an unaltered unconscious, free and unbound.
Wart's spontaneously organized work transforms the act of creation into new life. These illuminations generating shapes, textures and vibrant colours rely less on concrete depictions and more on the symbolic, magical, and impulsive expression of intangible impressions. Wart's paintings reflect the unclassifiable, even "undisciplined" path of this artist for whom constancy is essentially renewal.
Text: Céline Mayrand
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