Rita Letendre Receives 2016 Paul-Émile-Borduas Award

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We join with all art enthusiasts to celebrate the news that Rita Letendre has been announced as the 2016 recipient of the Paul-Émile-Borduas Award. This distinction is reserved for the very finest and most significant contributors to the art of Quebec.

Letendre (born Drummondville, Québec, 1928) has been a recognized stellar contributor to the art of Canada since the 1950s. The daughter of a Québécois father and an Abenaki mother, many have sensed that her work has bridged these two cultural traditions. Her early studies, exhibitions and artistic inclinations aligned with Paul-Émile Borduas and the automatistes. Her own paintings of the period are flamboyant, exuberant in expressionistic energy and idiosyncratic in colour. They have always been her unmistakable special personal contributions to art at mid- 20th century. For many her signature images emerged in the 1960s as she evolved an approach to geometric abstraction that involved strident linear patterning and a dynamic oblique, arrow-shaped motif.

Her works are coveted and collected by the nation’s leading art museums, corporations and private collections. Her works have been exhibited worldwide and at a spring 2003 Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec retrospective.

Rita Letendre is the recipient of a 2010 Governor General’s Award. She is represented by Montréal’s Galerie Simon Blais.