About —
The career of painter and author Monique Régimbald-Zeiber spans more than 35 years. She has developed a fascinating approach that disrupts the history of Québécois formalist painting by inserting references to the body and women’s realities, as described by women. Her mission: to give these stories a presence, rather than reducing them to anecdotes or news items, by “figuring differently.” She walks a fine line between abstract and figurative art, treating words as images and approaching pictorial composition from a syntactic perspective; the result is a distinctive hybrid of the disciplines at the heart of her work, literature and painting. Monique Régimbald-Zeiber has been a professor at UQAM’s school of visual and media arts for 20 years, where she has made a major contribution to the education of Quebec’s current generation of contemporary artists.
This Musée d’art de Joliette exhibition called Of Works and Hours is the artist’s first retrospective, comprising works from the 1980s along with very recent pieces, designed to highlight the common thread running through a career that has put dialogue front and centre.
This exhibition was first presented at the Musée d’art de Joliette from February 1st to September 6, 2020.
Exhibition Route —
October 8, 2021 to January 30, 2022
Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent
Rivière-du-Loup, Québec
March 26 – May 16, 2021
MA, musée d’art
Rouyn-Noranda, Québec
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Images in the banner:
Monique Régimbald-Zeiber, view of the exhibition Of Works and Hours, Musée d’art de Joliette, 2019. Photo credit: Romain Guilbault.
Biography —
Monique Régimbald-Zeiber lives and works in Montreal. Early in her career, she developed an interest in writing and politics in art. In 1980 she earned a PhD in literature, focusing on a comparative reading of text and imagery in the Russian avant-garde. She was a professor at UQAM’s school of visual and media arts from 1992 to 2012. As a painter, for more than three decades she has questioned the construction of the gaze and history, in particular that of women, with an approach focused on working at and within the intersections of painting and writing. As part of that work she took an interest in the skin as the ultimate repository of personal history. Her works are found in a variety of collections, including those of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Galerie de l’UQAM, and have been exhibited in Quebec, across Canada and in Europe. Her two most recent solo shows were in Rome in 2008 with Éclats de Rome at La Nube di Oort gallery, and in Montreal in 2011-2012 with Les dessous de l’histoire (2) at Galerie B 312. In 1997, she and Louise Déry, director of the Galerie de l’UQAM, founded a publishing house, Les Éditions les petits carnets.