Yves Gaucher enrolled at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal in 1954, however he felt neither aligned with the Automatiste spontaneity that was the prevailing aesthetic in Montreal at the time, nor the emerging geometric style of Guido Molinari and Fernand Toupin. He gravitated toward printmaking, as it was a more methodical process that gave him ample time to reflect. In the 1960s he visited New York City and Paris, taking in all of the avant-garde movements of abstract art, Pop Art and Op art that filled the galleries. By the end of the decade, Gaucher had arrived at a mature hard-edge abstract style that was aligned with the Plasticiens, executing paintings, drawings, gouaches and various methods of printmaking. This gouache illustrates the artist’s methodical approach to creating a well-structured composition of precise abstract forms.
