Fifty years of art: Major Riopelle exhibition opens at National Gallery of Canada

If your view of the work of Jean-Paul Riopelle is limited to thickly painted abstracts on huge canvases, the new exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada will leave your head spinning with the diversity and imagination of the famous Canadian artist, who died in 2002.

Riopelle: Crossroads in Time is a striking retrospective of the artist’s work, the grande finale in a year of celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of his birth on Oct. 7, 1923.  It runs until next spring.

By contrast, the number of pieces presented in Crossroads at the National Gallery of Canada — the first major exhibition under Bélisle’s leadership — is almost tenfold, with more than 130 works on view.

“I think that it’s really interesting to close the Riopelle year with an exhibition like this,” Bélisle said in an interview. “I found that a lot of the projects that have happened on Riopelle in the past year were very focused on a specific period, or specific subject or specific technique, but this is like the big coming-together moment where you have access to fifty years’ worth of artmaking.”

The show, which is presented chronologically by decade, takes up several thousand square feet of floor space in the gallery and includes many of those epic abstract paintings. But it also includes Riopelle’s sculptures, prints, collages and figurative drawings — as well as a thoughtful selection of pieces by contemporary artists that help to illustrate Riopelle’s influence, and sometimes provide a counterpoint to his perspective.

What she found during her research surprised and delighted her, Lacerte said in an interview.

“As I discovered Riopelle’s work throughout the 50 years of his practice, I saw things I had never seen myself, and I was just astounded at how contemporary some of these works still look,” she said. “Some of them, like the collages from the 60s, look so fresh. The form, the feeling and everything give you the impression they were done the day before yesterday. That was a big surprise and it got me really excited.”

Riopelle came to attention early in his career as one of the 16 Quebecois artists and intellectuals to issue Le Refus global (Total Refusal) in 1948, an anti-establishment and anti-religious manifesto that called for a new social and artistic movement in the province. In rejecting the academic and religious teachings that limited freedom of expression, the group was inspired by surrealism and its theory of automatism, a stream-of-consciousness approach to art-making.

Riopelle’s automatiste works evolved into his popular mosaic paintings of the 1950s, which were created, not with brushes, but with a spatula, knife and thick globs of oil paint. One of his most famous paintings of this period is the massive triptych Pavane (Tribute to the Water Lilies), which reveals a sculptural quality in the way the textures capture and reflect light.

Through the 60s and 70s, Riopelle continued to experiment, producing collages created from prints he had made, and casting sculptures in bronze. A series of pieces in the exhibition show his fascination with nature, including his monumental sculptures, The Bear and The Accompanied Owl. In the 80s, he worked with stencils and spray paint, and came up with the goose motif that was a hallmark of that period.

Also included are the black, white and grey paintings from the Iceberg series that illustrate Riopelle’s fascination with the Far North, a region he visited several times in the late 70s. Hung in an all-white room, the effect is like walking directly into an iceberg.

Other contemporary artists whose work is featured in Crossroads include Françoise Sullivan – who celebrated her hundredth birthday this year, Roseline Granet, Thomas Corriveau, Patrick Coutu, Manuel Mathieu, Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf, Marc Séguin and Aïda Vosoughi.

Riopelle stopped making art in 1992 for health reasons. One of his final pieces was the fresco, Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg, a tribute to his long-time partner, the American artist Joan Mitchell, who died of cancer that year. Crossroads includes work by Mitchell, as well as work that Riopelle created in the same style as Rosa, with spray paint and stencils.

Riopelle: Crossroads in Time is on view in Ottawa until April 7. Afterwards, it will be at the Winnipeg Art Gallery from June 1 to Sept. 29, 2024.

lsaxberg@postmedia.com