David Bolduc Biography

David Bolduc (1945 – 2010) was born in Toronto, and attended the Ontario College of Art (1962 – 1963) and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School (1964 – 1965) with Jean Goguen. His first exhibitions took place in Montreal galleries, including a solo show at the Elysee Theatre in 1966. He returned to Toronto in November 1966, where he worked in the Royal Ontario Museum’s conservation department.

His first solo show at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery in 1967 featured shaped canvases with contoured surfaces carrying simple geometric colour designs. Subsequently, he abandoned colour to work with minimal constructions of stretched white vinyl and simple structures made of rope, wood, and mirrors. In the late 1970s, Bolduc developed what would become his signature central image, inspired by the hands of a watch. He continued to return to this motif until the end of his career, featuring varying geometric and organic iterations of it in most of his paintings.

A 1968 Canada Council grant allowed him to leave his ROM job to visit Europe. He spent eight months travelling through Turkey, Nepal, Uzbekistan, and Moscow. In the ensuing four decades, he seldom remained at home for more than a year at a time — his 1960s trip was succeeded by visits to India, North Africa, China, Costa Rica, and other countries worldwide.

Bolduc held solo exhibitions across Canada almost every year of his nearly five-decade career, including at the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario. He showed annually at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery from 1967 – 1975, then began working with David Mirvish in 1976, and, subsequently, Alkis Klonaridis, who had been the Mirvish Gallery’s Director. Bolduc’s work was exhibited at the Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery (Regina, SK), the Diane Brown Gallery (Washington, D.C.), Watson/de Nagy & Company Gallery (Houston, Texas), Galerie Gilles Gheerbrant (Montreal, QC), Art 45 (Montreal, QC), Paul Kuhn Fine Art (Calgary, AB), the James Baird Gallery (St. John’s, NL), and the Moore Gallery (Toronto, ON), among other notable institutions and galleries.

David Bolduc worked with the Christopher Cutts Gallery from 2009 until his untimely death in 2010. The gallery is proud to continue to present Bolduc’s work in group exhibitions, international art fairs, and solo exhibitions.

In “Concise History of Canadian Painting,” Dennis Reid describes Bolduc’s painterly concerns, “Like others in Toronto who had re-established a sense of continuity with Western painting’s venerable history during the seventies, Bolduc found a working framework that situates his activity within a meaningful tradition — the making of decorative objects of commanding presence. The significant embellishing he practices and celebrates rises directly from the broadest cultural base — a fundamental human urge to enrich life by offering evidence of the particularly moving kind of pleasure conferred by the practiced, skillful conjunction of hand and mind.”