Artist, educator. Yves Gaucher was born in Montréal in 1934. A leading figure of Quebec’s postwar art scene, Gaucher studied at the École des beaux-arts in Montréal (1954-1956). He returned to study printmaking with Albert Dumouchel (1957-1960). Gaucher’s first exhibition took place at Galerie l’Échange in 1957. By 1960, he was president of the Associations des Peintures-Gravures de Montreal. The most formative event of his young career occurred in 1962, when Gaucher received a Canada Council Grant to study in Europe. Gaucher discovered the music of Anton Webern, a student and follower of Arnold Schoenberg and key figure in the development of the musical technique total serialism. Webern’s work radically altered Gaucher’s understanding of sound and images in space.
Also while abroad, Gaucher realized that he had a greater artistic connection to the work of contemporaneous American artists than to the European tradition. He returned to Canada and began to re-evaluate the work of the New York School. While Gaucher did make work with structural affinities to their aesthetic, he was interested in how to use the qualities of line, color, texture, light, and volume to create moments of embodied shifts in the consciousness of the viewer. In addition to his artistic practice, Gaucher taught for many years at Concordia University. In 1980, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He passed away in 2000.
Discrete project sites documenting the work of specific artists and collectives in detail.
Essays and conversation providing a context for exploring the Project Sites and Archives.
Video interviews conducted between December 2008 and May 2009 reflecting on Vancouver’s art scene in the sixties.