Serge Lemoyne

Serge Lemoyne

Serge Lemoyne, painter (b at Acton Vale, Qué 13 Jun 1941; d at Montréal 12 Jul 1998). A member of the avant-garde, he was considered a pioneer of performance art in Québec in the 1960s, with improvisations such as la Semaine A (1964), or his "happenings," which incorporated the use of his "splash" technique of tossing paint onto the artwork support.

Serge Lemoyne preferred popular subjects for his paintings, as in his celebrated "red, white and blue" period in which he employed colours based on the MONTREAL CANADIANS uniforms. Shunning academicism in his work and all outward manifestations of the institutionalization of art, Lemoyne was perhaps the first Québécois pop artist. A retrospective of his work was mounted by the MUSÉE DU QUÉBEC in 1988.