Yves GaucherLife & Work

“Gaucher’s well-practised intuition determines the exquisitely tuned details
of line lengths, tonalities, and relative placements. Despite their limited means,
the emotional range of the paintings is astonishing.”

– Roald Nasgaard

Yves Gaucher: Life & Work describes how this exceptional artist made his mark as an innovative printmaker, winning international prizes. It reveals how everything changed when Gaucher discovered the composer Anton Webern, and the artist was inspired to find visual equivalents to Webern’s scores: cues of pure notation—lines, squares, and dashes—that he called “signals.” These initial prints were crucial to Gaucher’s evolution into a post-Plasticien painter. Roald Nasgaard traces the post-Plasticien movement, which made Montreal a centre for a more anonymous, hard-edge, and colour-field painting style, describing Gaucher’s entry into the fold fully formed.

Yves Gaucher’s highly ordered, geometrical, and flat images constitute a unique unadulterated visual language. To this day a Gaucher painting is never static, but is caught up in a recurring series of rhythmic movements that envelop the viewer in a dynamic sensory experience.

Copyright Information

Banner Image: Yves Gaucher, Yellow, Blue & Red IV (Jaune, bleu & rouge IV), 1999. Photo: Arsenal Gallery. © Estate of Yves Gaucher / SODRAC (2015).