Guido Molinari Canadian, 1933-2004

Guido Molinari was born in Montreal in 1933. He took a few courses at Montreal's École des beaux-arts and the Museum of Fine Arts school between 1948 and 1951, but he owes the majority of his artistic education to his readings and travels, particularly to New York.

His first solo exhibition took place at the L’Échourie gallery in 1953, and three years later, his work was exhibited in the United States for the first time. In 1965, he participated in a major exhibition, The Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, before representing Canada at the 34th Venice Biennale in 1968, where he was awarded the David E. Bright Foundation prize. In 1976, the National Gallery of Canada organized a retrospective of his work and simultaneously published a collection of his writings, Écrits sur l’art (1954-1975). In 1995, the Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal held a major retrospective dedicated to Molinari, celebrating his unwavering commitment to abstract painting and his dynamic influence on the Canadian art scene.