It was at the Galerie de l’UQAM that Françoise Sullivan launched Thursday the activities that will celebrate her 100e birthday this year. The gallery presents the exhibition in digital form an imaginary lineand the book of the same name, by Louise Déry, which focuses on the career of the artist in the 1970s.
Signatory of Global denialbut also founder of the contemporary dance movement in Quebec, painter, sculptor, who rubbed shoulders witharte povera Italian to return to painting, again and again today, Françoise Sullivan remains an artist of the present time. It is in what she has seen and read that she finds the inspiration for her paintings, a recent production of which will be the subject of an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in the fall.
It was therefore necessary Louise Déry, director of the Galerie de l’UQAM and long-time friend, to probe the archives left by the artist, buried in her basement, and retrace a part of her career that had remained until now little explored. Through her texts and numerous photographs, we come into contact with the very singular approach of the artist, who continues to mix installation, choreography, photographs and painting, navigating between the intimate sphere, when she presents the scales of growth of her four boys, and the universal, when she takes for example the ancient figure of the Greek god Apollo to post it in the middle of a field of oil refineries.
For Françoise Sullivan, the traces of this era that Louise Déry extracted from these archives “were a game, for fun”, she said simply at the time of the opening of the exhibition on Thursday.
During the 1970s, Françoise Sullivan spent a lot of time in Italy, where she notably followed the trail of graffiti, which testified to a social, political and cultural revolution. “There are graffiti that were really very strong, almost surprising,” she said at the time of the opening. It was this project that first brought her to Italy, then prompted her to return there with her family.
There are also traces of a stroll around the columns of a temple, Tempio di Ercole (1976), or even around the trees, Tempio di Cibele (1976).
Busy capturing the moment, Françoise Sullivan doesn’t often look back. “In the present, we have new things to say and to do,” she says. So she had to, at the same time as Louise Déry, place her forgotten works of the 1970s in the great context of her artistic career. “And it’s quite surprising to see them here today,” she said.
Françoise Sullivan’s centenary will be an opportunity to present various exhibitions in Montreal, including that of some fifty works, pastels from 1996 to 2004, at gallery owner Simon Blais. The MMFA will also present the artist’s recent work this fall.