Gilles Mihalcean
ARTIST STATEMENT
For more than forty years, Gilles Mihalcean's sculptural work has been centered around a poetic and narrative approach built largely on the properties of the different materials used and their expressive capacity. Elaborated by assembly, the forms are associated and play with our perceptions through changes of scale, color and texture. The use of metaphor, the opening of the volumes to multiple interpretations, the search for surprise effects and humour are among the strategies with which the artist hopes to construct emotions well anchored to the surrounding sensitivity and culture.
Born in 1946 in Montreal where he lives and works, Gilles Mihalcean is a self-taught artist. His work has been widely distributed in Quebec since the 1970s. Extremely active and involved in the art world, he participates in numerous juries, was retained as a specialist in the Programme québécois d'intégration des arts à l'architecture from 1994 to 1997, and sat on the programming committee of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal from 1997 to 2002. His work is included in prestigious public and private collections and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in Quebec, Canada, Europe and the United States, including a retrospective at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal in 1995. He has also produced sculptures in the public space, including a recent commission from the City of Montreal for the Quartier des Spectacles (3 monumental sculptures). He received the Concours artistiques du Québec prize in 1969, the Victor-Martyn-Lynch-Staunton prize in 1988 and the Paul-Émile-Borduas prize in 2011. In addition to the Jean-Paul-Riopelle Career Grant in 2005, he has received numerous grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.
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