Marie-Eve Beaupré
Guido Molinari Foundation
Executive Director and Chief Curator
Read, look, listen, and think are the verbs that enable us to welcome the other into our lives. In this sense, hospitality is characteristic of Esse, which, for forty years, has welcomed to its pages authors who encourage discovery, in-depth exploration, transmission, and enhancement of research on art, artists, and art practices. In fact, hospitality is a value that Esse and the Guido Molinari Foundation share, mobilizing both organizations around important questions: How can everyone feel “at home” in the pages of a publication? In the galleries of an exhibition venue? The Vendu–Sold auction, through both its exhibition at the Foundation and its catalogue, offers an opportunity to discover, document, celebrate, and acquire works by remarkable artists.
The Foundation is a museum devoted to conservation, research, exhibition, and education, as well as an essential resource centre for those who wish to understand and appreciate nonfigurative art, geometric abstraction, and the historical, artistic and social contexts that fostered the blossoming of these currents. But before it housed the museum, this light-filled former bank was home to a family, an artist’s studio, a space for gathering and debate, a concert venue, and a place for conversations about art.
Hospitality was key to the approach of Guido Molinari (1933–2004), painter, professor, poet, and art critic and theoretician, and Fernande Saint-Martin (1927–2019), theoretician, director of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (1972–77), professor, semiologist, art critic, and poet. As a couple, their synergy contributed to the vitality of the Québec art scene for many decades. It is in this spirit that the Foundation’s team warmly welcomes all the artists, collectors, cultural workers, researchers, and readers involved with the centre and in the orbit of Esse.
Welcome, everyone!
Biographical note
Art historian and field practitioner Marie-Eve Beaupré was appointed general and artistic director of the Guido Molinari Foundation in spring 2023. Over the last twenty years, she has collaborated with institutions, museums, galleries, and artist-run centres as a conservator, curator, author, administrator, and jury member. She was Collection Curator at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2016–23) and Curator of Contemporary Québec and Canadian Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2014–16). She has also contributed to exhibition, acquisition, and research projects with the Musée national des beauxarts du Québec (2010–14) and the Galerie de l’UQAM (2004–12). Her enriching exchanges with artists over the years, as well as her work inventorying the studios of Edmund Alleyn, Sylvia Safdie, John Heward, Betty Goodwin, and Guido Molinari, have grounded her knowledge and comprehension of and her respect for the art ecosystem in which she participates.