Background
Armand Vaillancourt was born on September 3, 1929, in Thetford Mines, Quebec, Canada in a poor mining family. He is the the sixteenth of seventeen children.
Armand Vaillancourt was born on September 3, 1929, in Thetford Mines, Quebec, Canada in a poor mining family. He is the the sixteenth of seventeen children.
Armand Vaillancourt studied at the University of Ottawa from 1949 till 1950. He entered at the School of Fine Arts in Montreal in 1951 and studied fro three years.
Vaillancourt’s long and prolific career has featured by large-scale projects in the public space, including L'humain, a sculpture commissioned by the École des arts et métiers d’Asbestos (1963); Québec libre!, a fountain sculpture for San Francisco’s Embarcadero (1971); and Justice!, an anti-apartheid artwork executed for the Palais de justice de Québec (1983).
Armand Vaillancourt has created over three thousand works of art. He has exhibited his work in dozens of solo and group shows throughout Canada, United States and Europe. Vaillancourt has received many prestigious prizes in Quebec and many other important artistic distinctions in Canada and in the United States.
His works are represented in major Canadian collections, including that of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
Armand Guillaumin was a founder of the Association des Arts Plastiques in Montreal and a president of the Association of Quebec Sculptors.
Quotes from others about the person
An inventor of new techniques, he uses modern materials such as welded metal. He sees himself as a sculptor and social activist, committed to the battle to free Quebec's political prisoners. The symbolic figurative elements in some of his work stems from this conviction: a hand outstretched to the sky is a sign of despair, an expression of social injustice. The intensity of his symbolism lies in the interaction of the formal tensions of his works and is reinforced by their gigantic form. In wood or bronze, the play between his triangular, tubular or cubic geometric forms reflects strength and compression, mass and dynamism.
Armand Vaillancourt was married to Susanne Verdal until 1965.
