Montréal, 1923 – Saint-Antoine-de-l’Isle-aux-Grues, 2002

Jean-Paul Riopelle was born in Montréal, Canada, in 1923. After studying at the École du Meuble in Montréal, he devoted himself exclusively to painting from 1944. In 1945 he travelled to Paris on a Canadian government scholarship and the following year he was in New York, where he met Stanley William Hayter, Joan Miró, Jacques Lipchitz, and exhibited in the International Surrealist Exhibition.
In 1947 he settled in Paris, where he met André Breton and came into contact with artists linked to the Informal movement and lyrical abstraction, including Georges Mathieu, Wols and Hans Hartung.

In 1949, he held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Nina Dausset; this exhibition was followed by many others, as were numerous participations in international exhibitions. A globally acclaimed artist, he received a special mention from the Guggenheim International Award in New York in 1958.

Riopelle’s painting has always been abstract, involving the use of a pasty colour spread onto the canvas by strokes of a palette knife. The happy colour balance and the tight structuring of space marked by the spatula-like spreading of colour generate works that are rhythmic and full of energy.

In 1989 Riopelle left France. In 1992, on the death of his lifelong companion, the American artist Joan Mitchell, Riopelle painted the monumental triptych ‘L’hommage à Rosa Luxemburg’. Shortly afterwards the artist stopped painting. Riopelle spent his last years in Quebec, where he died in 2002 at the Ile aux Grues.