Marcelle Ferron

Sans titre 

Oil on canvas, signed lower right FERRON 64 
162.5 x 129.5 centimetres, 64 x 51 inches

Provenance:
Galerie de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec.
Private collection, USA.

This work is one of the artists finest from her prime period.

Availability: For sale

Biography:
 
Marcelle Ferron 1924-2001
 
Marcelle Ferron was born in Louiseville, Quebec in 1924. She is considered one of the dominant figures in contemporary Canadian art. Her career stretched over more than thirty years and from the beginning was been oriented towards the exploration of new avenues in art.
 
Very early on she joined the group of painters known as the Les Automatistes led by Paul-Emile Borduas. Other painters in the group were Marcel Barbeau, Pierre Gauvreau, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, and Jean-Paul Riopelle. This group of artists was bound by their passionate belief in modernism and especially in intellectual freedom. In 1948 they published the manifesto, Refus Global, which was an opportunity to express their deeply held beliefs. 1955 is generally considered the beginning of the Post Automatistes period. It includes artists such as Jean McEwen, Rita Letendre, Lise Gervais, Guy Michon, Guido Molinari, Claude Tousignant, Leon Bellefleur and others. In 1948, she was one of the signing parties of the Refus Global manifesto, a deed which was to bestow new vigour and spirit upon Quebecois cultural life.
 
In 1953 she moved to Paris, where she worked prodigiously for 13 years producing drawings and paintings and, at the same time, initiating herself into the art of the master glassworker.
 
Ferron participated in all the Automatiste group exhibitions, including the critically acclaimed retrospective "Borduas et les Automatistes" at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971. Her work was exhibited in numerous collective exhibitions, both in Europe and the U.S. Including L'Exposition des Surindependants and le Salon des Realites nouvelles in 1956, the Antagonisme show at the Louvre in 1960, and at the Paris Musee Art Moderne in 1962 and 1965. She also represented Quebec at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1961, the Festival des Deux Mondes in Spoleto, Italy in 1962 and the Osaka Universal Exposition in 1970. Her works have been the subject of more than thirty special shows throughout Canada as well as in Paris, Brussels and Munich. In 1970, the Musee Art Contemporain de Montreal staged a retrospective of her work, a show that was repeated in 1972 in Paris at the Canadian Cultural Centre.
 
Marcelle Ferron works can be found in many major public collections in North and South America and Europe such as the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, the Musee Art Contemporain, Montreal, the Agnes Etherington Centre, Kingston, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Hirshorn Museum, Washington and the Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo, Brazil.