Abstract painter Fernand Leduc was born in Montreal on July 4, 1916 and died there on January 28, 2014. In 1941, he registered at École des beaux-arts de Montréal where he met Paul-Émile Borduas. With his spouse Thérèse Renaud, he joined the Automatists and co-signed their Refus global in 1948. Then, he lived in Paris where he met up again with André Breton whom he had known in New York in 1945. Back in the country in 1953, he founded the Association des artistes non figuratifs de Montréal in 1956 with his friends Pierre Gauvreau, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Jean-Paul Mousseau and Françoise Sullivan. In 2006, he returned to Québec on a permanent basis after having spent more than forty years in France and Italy. Called  ‘’prince of light‘’, Fernand Leduc is without a doubt one of the pillars of abstract painting in Québec and Canada. His extensive work is marked by a constant concern for ethics, a deep love of painting and a relentless search for light. '' My challenge since 1970: paint light, and through its mobility, capture its energy. My path is one of sobriety, which is part of any artistic approach, a narrow path creating the clear, the luminous in order to lead to islands of light. '' (Fernand Leduc, 1993) Recipient of an honorary doctorate from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) (2006) and one of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts (2007), Fernand Leduc was also awarded an installation and catalogue at Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in 2006.