Charles Gagnon

Charles Gagnon was born on May 23, 1934, in Montreal, Quebec. He received his early education in Montreal, attending the Collège Notre-Dame and the Collège Sainte-Marie. Between 1955 and 1960, he lived in New York City, where he studied interior design at the Parsons School of Design and later enrolled at the New York School of Interior Design. Concurrently, he took evening classes in painting at the Art Students League of New York and audited courses at the New School for Social Research. During this five-year stay in New York, Gagnon developed an interest in photography alongside his painting practice and worked on early experimental films.

Returning to Montreal in 1960, Gagnon established an active studio practice encompassing painting, photography, film, and mixed-media box constructions. In 1967, he received a commission to produce a photographic and audio installation titled "The Christian Pavilion" for Expo 67 in Montreal. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, his work was acquired by several major public collections, and in 1975, he joined the faculty at the University of Ottawa, teaching photography and multimedia arts in the Department of Visual Arts until his retirement in 1996.

Throughout his career, Gagnon was the subject of significant institutional surveys. In 1978, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts organized a comprehensive retrospective of his work, which subsequently traveled to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. His cross-disciplinary approach made him a regular participant in group surveys of contemporary Canadian art presented at public institutions both nationally and abroad, including exhibitions organized by the Centre Culturel Canadien in Paris.

In recognition of his contributions to Canadian visual arts, Gagnon received several major honours. He was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) and was awarded the Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas by the Government of Quebec in 1995. In 2002, he received the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. His works are held in the permanent collections of public institutions across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Gagnon died in Montreal on April 16, 2003.