Suzanne Guité studied architecture under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at Chicago’s former Institute of Design, later training in sculpture as a student of Archipenko and Brancusi. In 1956, she and her husband, painter Alberto Tommi, founded the Centre d’art de Percé, which would become a vibrant melting pot of the arts in Quebec. That same year, she earned third prize at the Concours artistique de la Province de Québec, while in 1958, she was invited to the Venice Biennale. She completed a monumental sculpture entitled Maternité aux jumeaux for Canada’s pavilion at Expo 67 and was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1975. Guité was best known as a sculptor, but also created paintings, tapestries and murals. She considered sculpting to be a kind of ritual that required listening to one’s material, a belief which inspired her careful selection of wood, gathered from Gaspésie and South America, and ancient rocks. Her career path reflects her unwavering interest in the universal notion of man’s connection with the universe: his journey in the face of the Absolute, death and the return to the origins of life. Her work evokes the mythology of the earth and woods that pertains to the earliest civilizations, blurring the line between figurative and abstract art. Her pieces were also influenced by pre-Columbian art, tending toward the themes of love, maternity, couples and representations of man.
SEE:
« Vitalité et pluralisme — La sculpture des années cinquante au Québec : Le travail de Anne Kahane et Suzanne Guité » by Joyce Millar, ESPACE #22, p. 23.
