Mimi ParentLife & Work

Mimi Parent (1924–2005) played a key role in the international Surrealist movement. Trained at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal under Alfred Pellan, she developed an experimental practice that came fully into view during her years in Paris, at the heart of Surrealism’s postwar evolution. Her famed work Masculine/feminine—a tie made of Parent’s own long, luxurious mane, set against a man’s suit lapels—was chosen by André Breton for the poster of the 1959 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris. Despite this achievement, and the fact that Parent’s work has been exhibited internationally at museums including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Tate Modern, London, her legacy has been overlooked in Canadian art history.

In Mimi Parent: Life & Work, authors Maria Rosa Lehmann and Laurence Niro offer the first comprehensive study of the artist’s wide-ranging practice. Parent introduced an important theatrical element to Surrealist art in 1959 with her creation of the three-dimensional tableaux boxes in which she presented dramatic scenes from mythology, folklore, and her own imagination. Moving between painting, drawing, assemblage, and immersive environments, her work resists easy categorization. Her multimedia approach resulted in richly layered works that pushed the Surrealist movement in new formal directions.