Jean-Paul Riopelle

Jean-Paul Riopelle was a Canadian painter, sculptor, and printmaker born in Montreal. He is acknowledged to have been the first Canadian painter to receive international recognition since James Wilson Morrice. Riopelle began as a landscape painter before shifting into abstraction in the mid-1940s. He settled in Paris in 1947 and spent time in the company of other lyrical and surrealist artists and poets such as Jean Miró, Georges Mathieu, and André Breton. Riopelle had his first solo exhibition in the Galerie La Dragonne in Paris in 1949 and represented Canada in the 1962 Venice Biennale.