René Gagnon
(1928 - 2022)
canadian painter
René Gagnon was born in 1928 in Chicoutimi. He is a Canadian landscape painter. He began to paint at the age of sixteen. Thanks to his art dealer uncle, René Gagnon was able to rub shoulders with many Quebec painters such as Marc-Aurèle Fortin, René Richard and Stanley Cosgrove passing through the region. He will learn his painting techniques independently and self-taught.
He exhibited for the first time at Arvida in 1959 and then in Montreal and New York in subsequent years. He founded the gallery of Canadian painters at Place des Arts in 1967.
The Berheim gallery in Paris presents the works of René Gagnon in the 1970s.
In 1995, he made an exhibition tour in Asia which took him to Hong Kong, Taipei, Manila and Kuala Lumpur. It was at this time that Toh Puan Mahani Idris Daim, wife of the Minister of Finance, Ton Daim Zainuddin, invited him to paint the jungle and the luxuriant flora of his country. He accepted the challenge and settled in 1996 for three months in Malaysia's largest national park, Taman Negara. The paintings are sold in an exhibition in Kuala Lumpur through the Yayasan Seni Berdaftar Foundation which supports young Malaysian artists.
In 2004, it was in Morocco that he exhibited on the occasion of the festivities of the 36th anniversary of the enthronement of King Hassan II. The President of the Afriquia group invites him to paint the desert of Ouarzazate and the landscapes of Morocco.
The same year, the La Pulperie museum in Chicoutimi organized a major retrospective entitled "The Art of Landscape according to René Gagnon", 60 years of career.
In 2012, Christine Gillie wrote her biography entitled De rêve et de paysage. The launch will take place in June 2014 at his personal museum in Anse-de-Roche. The biography will be published in a numbered limited edition case with 100 original paintings.
In 2014, he returned to exhibit in Montreal and moved to the Petit Musée René Gagnon in Old Montreal. He is exhibiting recent works in the metropolis for the first time in thirty years.
The painter, known for her Laurentian landscapes in her Saguenay region, died in January 2022 at the age of 93.