Galerie Denyse Delrue, Montreal
Private Collection, Montreal
As a high school student in Quebec City in the 1940s, Marcella Maltais enrolled in Saturday art classes at École des beaux-arts de Québec, where she met Jean Paul Lemieux. In 1949 she worked an office job while taking night classes taught by Jean-Philippe Dallaire, who motivated her to pursue painting as a career. Throughout the early 1950s Maltais rented a studio and showed her work in local group exhibitions in Quebec and the Charlevoix region.
A major shift in Maltais’s career occurred in 1955, when she moved to Montreal and encountered the Automatistes and other avant-garde artists including Guido Molinari, Claude Tousignant, Marcelle Ferron and Rita Letendre. “Rébellion” was completed in 1957, shortly following her move and transformation from figurative painting to abstraction. With its spontaneous, ‘all-over’ brushwork, it demonstrates the influence of the Automatistes and other artistic peers. During the same year, Maltais showed her works alongside François Soucy at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as well as with Armand Vaillancourt at Galerie Denyse Delrue in Montreal. She quickly became recognized as one of the most talented young painters of Quebec of the period, a reputation she has maintained to this day.
