Quebec painter and sculptor Marcel Barbeau was born in Montreal on February 18, 1925 and died on January 2, 2016. From 1942 to 1947, he studied at École du Meuble de Montréal where he was initiated to modern art by Paul-Émile Borduas, his drawing professor. Between 1944 and 1953, he joined the Automatists, a multidisciplinary artistic movement inspired by surrealism, and signed their Refus global manifesto published in 1948. It is at the beginning of this period that he produced with Jean-Paul Riopelle the first abstract expressionism paintings and sculptures in Canada. The ‘’all-over‘’ composition of some of his paintings was aesthetically avant-garde for the era. Always in search of new modes of expression, Marcel Barbeau also explored various artistic disciplines, joining musicians, dancers and actors in interdisciplinary creation events. Marcel Barbeau's work is both refined and expressive. "What matters to him... is to attest, in its encompassing lateral marginality, the absolute initial creative principle, the pure original establishing power of the pictorial apparition, in its irreductibility to any formulation, which it promotes or is likely to establish. "(Charles Delloye, Cercle d'Art, Paris (1994)) Exhibited in Canada, the United States, Europe and North Africa, his works were the subject of numerous articles, catalogues, biographic dictionaries, art books, academic work as well as art videos and films.