MAC 2018: Françoise Sullivan

Françoise Sullivan
Retrospective of Her Career

October 20, 2018 - January 20, 2019

The Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art - Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), is presenting a retrospective of a leading figure of Québec’s avant-garde and signatory of the Refus global manifesto: Françoise Sullivan.

The Françoise Sullivan exhibition celebrates the artist’s wide-ranging artistic approaches with an impressive selection of works and archival pieces representing milestones from the artist’s career and celebrating Sullivan’s development from the 1940s to the present day.

A prominent figure in the history of Québec art, Sullivan began her career in the 1940s as a member of the emerging Automatist movement, and she never ceased reinventing herself. This major MAC retrospective is showcasing her wide-ranging, prolific artistic career that has left an important mark on contemporary art in Canada. Some fifty works are shown, including paintings, sculptures, and archival documentation, accompanied by a special program of unique performances.

“Already an accomplished painter, dancer and choreographer seventy years ago, Françoise Sullivan is now considered Québec’s first multidisciplinary artist,” notes John Zeppetelli, Director and Chief Curator of the MAC.

Exploring the sources of human nature

Françoise Sullivan’s involvement with the Automatists marked a watershed moment in the artist’s life and Québec art history. Yet her contribution to modern Québec runs much deeper. Over the course of a prolific career, Sullivan has explored the sources of human nature, posing a number of aesthetic questions that brought her into the fold of multiple avant-garde movements in Québec art. In the words of Mark Lanctôt, Curator at the MAC, Sullivan spent her career “searching for new ways of both being of her time and expressing a timeless interiority, a new universalism driven by the desire to reach beyond herself.”
 

Performances at the MAC

In addition to the artworks on display, the MAC will present a cycle of performances representative of Françoise Sullivan’s important work as a choreographer and contemporary dancer. To integrate these performances in the exhibition, the Museum commissioned performing artists to present new works in a specially designed performance space. Invited artists include Dana Michel (associate artist at Par B.L.eux), The Two Gullivers (Flutura & Besnik Haxhillari), Dorian Nuskind-Oder, Simon Grenier-Poirier, Catherine Lavoie-Marcus and Maryse Larivière. Performances will be presented beginning on October 23. The performance schedule is available on the MAC website: https://macm.org/en/activities/performances/

Françoise Sullivan Biography

Born in Montreal in 1923, Françoise Sullivan studied at Montreal’s École des beaux-arts in the 1940s, during which time she and a circle of artist friends headed by Paul-Émile Borduas established the movement known as “Les Automatistes.” A co-signatory of the group’s Refus global manifesto, she contributed a seminal essay on contemporary dance, “La Danse et l’espoir” (Dance and Hope). An accomplished painter, dancer and choreographer, she spent the years from 1945 to 1947 in New York studying modern dance under Franziska Boas, among others. Shortly after returning to Montreal, she created Danse dans la neige (Dance in the Snow) (1948), which marked a defining moment in her artistic career. In the 1960s, she turned her attention to sculpture, working notably with steel and Plexiglas. She made her first trips to Greece and Italy in the 1970s, and, as a member of the Véhicule Art artist-run centre, Sullivan experimented with performative and “immaterial” approaches associated with conceptual art. The 1980s marked a return to painting, with matierist tondos and later figurative works inspired by ancient mythology. During the second half of the 1990s, she embarked on a lengthy exploration of abstract painting, a passion she continues to pursue today.

Françoise Sullivan taught at Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts from 1977 to 2009. Her works have been shown in Canada, the United States, France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Japan. She has received the Prix Paul-Émile Borduas and the Order of Canada and was named a knight of the Order of Québec. Retrospectives of her work have been mounted by the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. In 2005, Françoise Sullivan won the Governor General’s Award in the Visual and Media Arts, and in 2008, the Gershon Iskowitz Prize.

 Catalogue 

For the Françoise Sullivan retrospective, the MAC will publish a substantial catalogue (288 pages, 180 illustrations), featuring essays by Mark Lanctôt, exhibition curator, Vincent Bonin, Ray Ellenwood and Noémie Solomon. An illustrated chronology, written by Chantal Charbonneau, completes the publication. The catalogue is available for $39.95 at the MAC Boutique.

The Françoise Sullivan retrospective will embark on a multi-city Canadian tour organized in collaboration with two Ontario museums: the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, and the Art Gallery of Windsor. It will then be shown in the Musée régional de Rimouski (Québec) and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (British Columbia). This travelling exhibition is funded in part by the Government of Canada.

Click on images to enlarge them.

All images in this article:  Photo © Nadia Slejskova

For more information about MAC, visit the museum's website.

 

Also see my article about Françoise Sullivan exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine arts that opened in November 2023 and celebrated her 100th birthday here.