Do you like Riopelle?

Over the years, art critics, museum curators, journalists, and collectors have sometimes been taken aback by Jean Paul Riopelle’s paintings and sculptures—works that challenged their expectations of what modern art should be. But does Riopelle’s art still have the power to surprise, unsettle, or even shock us today?

This lecture by Pierre B. Landry takes a fresh look at some of Riopelle’s less celebrated and often misunderstood works, exploring the artist’s motivations and inviting us to reconsider our own perceptions of his art. Along the way, Pierre B. Landry tackles some intriguing questions: Why did Canada’s most celebrated abstract painter embrace figuration? Why did he trade oil paint for spray paint? And why so many birds…?