Rita Letendre

A pioneer of Canadian abstract art, Rita Letendre exhibited her work in Canada and around the world. She was awarded the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts—the nation’s highest honor for a visual artist—in 2010. Letendre enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal in 1948 but was dissatisfied with its emphasis on traditional figurative art. Withdrawing from the school, she found affinity within Montreal’s growing avant-garde scene and became affiliated with Paul-Émile Borduas and Les Automatistes, a group of Québécois artists inspired by the Surrealist theory of automatism and considered to be the first Canadian modernist art movement. In 1954 Letendre was included in the Automatiste exhibition “La matière chante,” which brought wider attention to Canadian abstract art. From her early gestural abstractions, her work evolved towards a geometric style that incorporated bold colors and her signature motif, the arrow. Letendre said that her work is grounded in metaphors of light, darkness and movement in an ongoing commitment to the process of discovery of the self.