Québec 1931 - MontréaL 2004
Biography
Born in Québec City in 1931 to a family of English and Irish heritage, Edmund Alleyn attended the École des beaux-arts in Québec City, where he studied with Jean-Paul Lemieux and Jean Dallaire. In 1955, he won the Grand Prix aux concours artistiques de la Province de Québec and a grant from the Royal Society of Canada.
From 1955 to 1971, Alleyn lived in France, where he explored lyric abstraction, then drew inspiration from West Coast Native art and, finally, moved toward an imagery that came out of the world of technology, electronics and mass media. He also represented Canada at international arts events on a few occasions, including the Guggenheim International Award in 1958 and the Venice Biennale in 1960.
Upon returning to Québec, he settled in Montréal and continued to pursue his painting career there while teaching at the University of Ottawa from 1972 to 1991. On his return to Québec, he was struck by the changes that had taken place while he was away, and his art shows signs of this impression. In 1990, he exhibited the Indigo series at the Galerie d’art Lavalin and at 49th Parallel in New York. At the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Sherbrooke in 2004, he showed his final series, Les Éphémérides, which comprises 12 large canvases as well as ink washes. Alleyn died on December 24, 2004, at the age of 73.
In 2016, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal presented a retrospective exhibit entitled Edmund Alleyn, In my studio, I am many. According to its curator, Mark Lanctôt, the exhibit’s focus on plurality speaks to how the artist resisted classification through his ever-changing materials and themes. It also explains why he is absent from much of Quebec’s historiographical discourse.
Remarkably versatile, Edmund Alleyn was an innovator whose stylistically diverse paintings, drawings and multimedia installations are all critically regarded as superb examples of their genre. An intellectual painter, his oeuvre resonates with the tensions that exist between the figurative and non-figurative, sometimes playfully marrying Pop and Formalist art together. In his later work, he invoked an elegiac, cinematic quality, inviting viewers to locate their place within his work.
https://macm.org/expositions/edmund-alleyn/
http://edmundalleyn.com/fr/biographie/
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/alleyn-edmund
