Serge Lemoyne, self-portrait
BIOGRAPHY
Serge Lemoyne was born in Acton Vale in 1941. A member of the avant-garde, he was considered a pioneer of performance art in Québec in the 1960s, with improvisations such as la Semaine A (1964), or his "happenings," which incorporated the use of his "splash" technique of tossing paint onto the artwork support.
Shunning academicism in his work and all outward manifestations of the institutionalization of art, Lemoyne was perhaps the first Québécois pop artist. He died in Montreal in 1998.
SUBJECT / THEMES
Serge Lemoyne preferred popular subjects for his paintings, as in his celebrated "red, white and blue" period in which he employed colours based on the Montreal Canadians uniforms.
EXHIBITION
A retrospective of his work was mounted by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in 1988.
In the Montreal exhibition Peinture peinture in 1998, there was the sixteen-panel Hommage à Matisse (Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec) from the late 1990s by Serge Lemoyne. It has a poetic richness that is different from his culturally charged paintings of the 1970s dedicated to the red, white and blue colours of the Montreal Canadiens hockey team.
Source: Roald Nasgaard, Abstract painting in Canada, Douglas&McIntyre, Canada, 2007; The Canadian Encyclopedia
