Notations: New & Recent Work

Pierre Coupey was born in Montreal in 1942. He graduated from McGill University (BA), the University of British Columbia (MA), and studied drawing and printmaking at the Academie Julian and the Atelier 17 in Paris. Since 1964 he has published five books of poetry and exhibited paintings and prints in over 40 solo and group shows in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, Seattle, Tokyo and Dublin. His work is represented in over 100 private, corporate and public collections, including those of the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank and the Vancouver Art Gallery. In her catalogue essay for Coupey's solo exhibition at the Canadian Embassy Gallery in Tokyo, curator and criitic Paula Gustafson notes that "Coupey's work moves uninterrupted across and through the matrices of [...] three media [painting, printmaking and poetry]: most deliberately between poetry and printmaking, most exuberantly with direct painting where his colour gestures are uttered as syllables and notes. In each he explores a philosophical path as modern as it is ancient -- the mind comprehending itself through the action of the body." As Gustafson also notes, "These paintings and prints from the Notations series articulate a restless imagination for which no single form or medium suffices."