Léon Bellefleur - Abstractionism and Surrealism

 

 Léon Bellefleur (1910 - 2007) was a French-Canadian painter and print-maker.
Léon Bellefleur was born in Montréal, Quebec, in 1910, and by the age of ten was drawing and painting.He earned a teaching diploma at Jacques Cartier teachers college in Montreal, graduating in 1929 and had a career in teaching for the next 25 years. He was mainly self-taught as an artist, but took evening classes from around 1929 until 1936 at the École des Beaux-Arts where he expressed his youthful admiration for the work of Rembrandt. In 1938, Bellefleur met Alfred Pellan and through a friend, the Montreal art world. In 1943, he joined the Contemporary Arts Society. He was also a member of the Canadian Group of Painters, the Canadian Society of Graphic Art and The Non-Figurative Artists' Association of Montreal (1960).
He participated in the activities of the Montreal surrealists and in Montréal in 1945, he participated in the Exquisite corpse (Cadavre exquis) experiments with Albert Dumouchel, Jean Benôit, Jean Léonard, Mimi Parent and Pellan. In 1948, he signed the manifesto Prisme d'yeux, which defended diverse approaches to art-making.
After the group dissolved, he remained friendly with the members of the Prisme d'yeux, but followed his own aesthetic, inspired by Paul Klee, Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and children`s art.Although he had been influenced in his early work by Pellan, following automatism and surrealism, he began to record the unconscious, creating coded atmospheres, states of mind and crystalline structures.[6] He once said:"The fundamental discoveries for me were poetry, surrealism and esoterism - and, in art, a certain automatism translating the life of dreams and the unconscious, the world of chance and mystery."Wikipedia 

 

 

 

 

 

Sven Inge Höglund

 

 Sven Inge Höglund  (1935 –2008) was a Swedish painter and pop artist who came to some prominence in the late 1960s, doing performed visual experiments with digital technology as an art medium, and coloristic paintings.Sven Inge was born in Umeå in 1935 and grew up in a small village in Västerbotten in northern Sweden. From early age, he was interested in drawing and became involved in experimental art after moving to Sundsvall, and later to Stockholm by the early 1960s. At the end of the 1960s, he gained notability co-producing, together with Ture Sjölander and Lars Weck, the experimental video performances Monument (1968) and Space in the Brain (1969), both made for Swedish Television. In addition to video performances, he worked with static images of science fiction and space travel, as well as a number of monumental paintings. In 1972, Inge created the photographic work Glesbygdare, and in 1973 Kronotorpare. Later, Inge worked with computerized holographic art, notably The Expanded Cube, which was performed at art galleries in the United States, Japan, and Taiwan. In the 1970s, he also worked with laser installations. As of the late 1970s, Sven Inge focused more on paintings, as well as a number of transparent three-dimensional images on acryl glass.

 

Alfonso Ossorio - Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism

Alfonso Angel Yangco Ossorio (1916 –1990) was an Filipino American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Manila in 1916 to wealthy Filipino parents from the province of Negros Occidental. His heritage was Hispanic, Filipino, and Chinese. Between the ages of eight and thirteen, he attended school in England. At age fourteen, he moved to the United States. Ossorio attended Portsmouth Priory (now Portsmouth Abbey School) in Rhode Island, graduating in 1934. From 1934 to 1938, he studied fine art at Harvard University and then continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. He became an American citizen in 1933 and served as a medical illustrator in the United States Army during World War II.Wikipedia
"Alfonso Ossorio synthesized Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Art Brut styles over the course of his career. His early works were inspired by Surrealism, although he created these paintings by pouring oil and enamel paint onto canvas—a technique aligned with abstract expressionist art. A meeting with Jean Dubuffet sparked Ossorio’s interest in Art Brut, as he was drawn to the form’s shedding of fine art preconceptions. Ossorio’s career is marked by an oscillation between the influences of Jackson Pollock and Dubuffet—both of whom the artist was friends with—and experimentation with abstraction and figuration. “Congregations,” a series of Dubuffet-inspired assemblages, evoke a Catholic spirit and decorative energy that is characteristic of Ossorio’s paintings."(.artsy.net)

Dennis Creffield - Artworks

Dennis Creffield (1931 –2018) was a British artist with work owned by major British and worldwide art collections, including the Tate Gallery, The British Museum, Arts Council of England, the Government Art Collection, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Leeds City Art Gallery, University of Leeds collection, Williams College Museum of Art, University of Brighton collection, Swindon Art Gallery collection and others.
In 1985, Creffield was commissioned by the Arts Council to draw every cathedral in England, a task undertaken by living in a camper van for two years. This resulted in the exhibition 'English Cathedrals' at the Hayward Gallery, London, which subsequently toured Britain (1988–1990),and a related book written by Creffield. Six of these drawings, including 'Peterborough: Approaching the West Front' and several views of Canterbury Cathedral were acquired by the Tate Gallery in 1990. A very positive review by the distinguished writer on art, Peter Fuller, of a touring exhibition of Creffield's drawings of English cathedrals appeared in the first issue of the journal, Modern Painters (then edited by Fuller, its founder), together with an essay by Roy Oxlade on their teacher, David Bomberg.
After the cathedrals of England, further series of drawings were commissioned, including the cathedrals of northern France, shown at the Albemarle Gallery in London in 1991. In 2005, Flowers Gallery, London, staged a major retrospective exhibition and published a catalogue including a foreword by novelist Howard Jacobson and a conversation between Dennis & Professor Lynda Morris. Creffield's importance as a contemporary draughtsman was also recognised in 2008 when he was included in the exhibition 'Drawn from the Collection, 400 Years of British Drawing' at Tate Britain.Wikipedia