Canadian Surrealist painter and maker of objects, born on 8 September 1924 in Montreal, died on 14 June 2005 in Villars-sur-Ollon (Switzerland).
Life
The eighth of the nine children of the architect Lucien Parent, Marie Parent, known as Mimi, studied from 1942 to 1947 at the École des beaux-arts in Montreal, where she was taught by Alfred Pellan. She was expelled in 1947 for indiscipline, the year of her first solo exhibition, at the Dominion Gallery in Montreal. In 1948 she co-signed the manifesto Prisme d’yeux with thirteen other artists.
Married to the sculptor Jean Benoît, she moved with him to Paris, where the couple lived and worked for many years. In 1959 she joined the Surrealist group. For the International Surrealist Exhibition devoted to Eros (1959-1960) she designed the poster and the layout of the catalogue, the Boîte alerte. Missives lascives, and took charge of the fetishism room.
She went on to take part in the Surrealist exhibitions in Milan (1960), “L’Écart absolu” in Paris (1965), São Paulo (1967) and “The Pleasure Principle” in Prague (1968). After her death, Jean Benoît scattered her ashes at the Château de Lacoste, the former home of the Marquis de Sade.
The work
In her last decades Mimi Parent made picture-objects: black wooden boxes in which scenes are played out behind glass, in rich colours that heighten their strangeness. She combined found objects and painting, and sometimes used human hair, as in the whip Maîtresse (1996). She also left ink drawings.
The gallery showed rare works by Mimi Parent in the exhibition “At the Sources of Convulsive Beauty” (September 2024).
Exhibitions and collections
- “La Femme et le surréalisme”, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, 1987
- “Féminin-masculin”, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1995
- Retrospective, Galerie 1900-2000, Paris, 1998
- “Surrealism: Desire Unbound”, Tate Modern, London, 2001
- Mimi Parent and Jean Benoît retrospective, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2004