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Yvon Gallant

Yvon Gallant was born in 1950 in Moncton, New Brunswick, a place he still calls home. Known as a painter of everyday life, he finds inspiration in the day-to-day realities of his environment.

One of the first generation of graduates from the visual arts program at the Universite de Moncton, Gallant received his Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 1976. He has taught silkscreen printing in the Visual Arts department at the Universite de Moncton, and worked for the National Film Board to produce, among other projects, thirty-three illustrations for the film ‘La Reconnaissance du Chien’, in collaboration with Viola Leger and Robert Melanson. He served as managing director of the artist-run centre Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton (1984-1985) and was curator of the postal art exhibition Exposition d’art postale (1987). He is a founding member of  Galerie Sans Nom and the Centre Culturel Aberdeen. He has volunteered on numerous cultural committees, helping to shape the cultural landscape of the present day arts scene in Moncton.

Yvon Gallant has shown his work in over one hundred solo and group exhibitions in the Atlantic region, across Canada, and beyond. He has often worked in collaboration with other Moncton artists, notably Nancy Morin, in an exhibition/performance entitled ‘Travaux Monc/treal Works’ (1989), which concluded with six works by the two artists being torn into thirty-six pieces. The torn pieces were mixed up and entrusted to various persons for a period of ten years, the intention being to reassemble the works for an exhibition in the year 2000.

In 1994, a retrospective exhibition entitled ‘Yvon Gallant: d’apres une histoire vrais’, showing over seventy of the artist’s paintings from a twenty year period, was organized by Terry Graff, then the Director of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum, in Charlottetown, Prince-Edward-Island. Graff also wrote and published an extensive monograph on the artist based on the retrospective.

Gallant has been awarded several grants and prizes by: the Canada Council of the Arts, the New Brunswick Arts Council and the Province of New Brunswick, including the Miller Britain Prize for Excellence in the Visual Arts, in 1992.

His narrative paintings often depict people from the Acadian artistic community. In some of his paintings, characters, real and mythical, inspired by Monctonians, become symbols of the spirit and identity of his social milieu. Behind Yvon Gallant’s paintings is a lucid mind tinted with a laconic humour, which attempts to outsmart the hypocrisy and prejudice of his community.

Yvon Gallant was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art in 2005.