Born December 23rd 1932

Claude Tousignant is a well-known Quebec painter whose work has made an important contribution to the development of abstract painting in Canada. He graduated from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School in 1952 and soon became an active member of the Plasticist group. In the 1950s and early 1960s his works were Hard-edge, chromatic paintings that revealed the influence of Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman. Some of his early paintings were shown in the Op Art exhibit The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965. Many critics considered his use of industrial paint on canvas radical and others considered his works a disgrace to painting. Tousignant persisted with his methods and experiments with paint. In the 1960s he became famous for his series Transformateurs chromatiques,Gongs and Accélérateurs chromatiques. He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1976, and won the Paul-Émile-Borduas Prize in 1989. His work was featured in solo exhibits at the National Gallery of Canada (1998, 1982, 1973-1975) and at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (1980, 1981).