Overview
As an artist of exemplary energy, Letendre has worked with a wide variety of media and techniques, including oil, acrylic, casein, pastel, airbrushing and screen-printing.
Rita Letendre was born in Drummondville, Québec in 1928 to a Québécois father and Abenaki mother. In 2021 at 93 years old, in Toronto. Her work evolved along with her studies in art and association with various artistic movements, including that of Paul-Émile Borduas’ Automatistes. Her many exhibitions in Canada and abroad—she spent time in France, Italy, Israel and the United States before finally settling in Toronto in 1970—have made her a key artist of the country’s postwar period. She is the recipient of a 2010 Governor General’s Award, the highest honour granted to Canadian visual artists.
Works
Biography

Letendre's artistic career has been characterized by a consistency of approach.

In 1954, her work was included in the major Automatiste exhibition La matière chante, where it attracted the attention of the critic Rodolphe de Repentigny. Her first solo show took place at the Montreal gallery L’Échourie in 1955; later, in 1961, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presented a selection of her large-sized works. Since then, numerous solo exhibitions of her work have been held in Montréal, Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, Vancouver and Edmonton, as well as in Israel, the United States (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Detroit and Chicago), France, Italy, and other countries.

 

Letendre's method has taken her from the structured, gestural abstraction of the 1950s and early 1960s to the hard-edge and geometric abstraction of the late 1960s and the 1970s, when she developed her preferred motif—the arrow.  Since then, her work has moved toward a new form of gesture through the oblique, in which the electrifying power of colour and dynamic composition are constants. An artist of exemplary energy, she has worked with a wide variety of media and techniques, including oil, acrylic, casein, pastel, airbrushing and screen-printing. A number of large-scale outdoor murals that she executed in various locations in Canada and the United States between 1965 and 1980 further cemented her renown.

 

 

Exhibitions