Biography
Rita Rodrigue has been a professional French-Canadian artist creating contemporary works for over forty five years, having exhibitions worldwide, with emphasis in Quebec and parts of Ontario. She has had many years of visual art training along as an art professor in the College of Gatineau.
She has presented about thirty themed since 1980 in solo and collective in Montreal at the Musée Marc-Aurèle Fortin and City Hall Art Galleries Karsh Masson of Ottawa, Maison-des-Arts Alfred Pellan in Laval and abroad at the Museum of Modern Art in Seoul, South Korea. She also exposed at the Fremantle Museum Arts Centre in Australia, and at the Galerie Art-Tournelle in Paris, France, at the Gallery La Aduana in Barranquilla, Colombia as well as at the Moraga Art Gallery in San Francisco.
She has won various awards, and her work has been purchased for public and private collections such as Loto-Quebec and Pratt& Whitney. In the context of integrating the art with architecture, she completed two projects out of three for the government of Quebec. She has also accomplished a project for the Municipality of Gatineau.
In 2015, one of her paintings of a permanent collection of the City of Gatineau was selected to participate in an exhibition (Dialogues de l’oeil), presented in the Montcalm Gallery of Gatineau. The painting is also part of the poetry book (Dialogues de l’oeil), published by the Neige–galerie Editions.
Her deep French-Canadian and Native American roots has provided her with the unique ability to detail very colourful, expressive, poetic and mystical works which has been overwhelmingly accepted by art admirers and investors alike.
2018 marks an important year in Rita Rodrigue's career. In addition to presenting Les Temps échelonnés – Ancient and Recent Works by Rita Rodrigue at the Jean-Claude Bergeron Gallery in Ottawa, she has published Les temps échelonnés de Rita Rodrigue - 50 ans de creation by author Josée Valiquette.
The productivity of Rita Rodrigue has generated a considerable body of work for which the documentation was so far very fragmented. Josée Valiquette's book is the result of a desire to fill this gap, not only for the artist herself and her posterity, but above all for our collective cultural heritage.
Artist's Statement
The only way to make my art transcend time is to ensure it has a place in the future, and to express it to people nowadays.
The complexity makes contact with a parallel life where the human soul is beautifully scarred by ideas and tears revealing mystical messages from the temporal to the atemporal.