Rita Letendre Canadian, 1928-2021

Of Indigenous Abenaki and Québécois descent, Rita Letendre was a Canadian abstractionist known for her large-scale ‘arrow’ paintings. First exhibiting within the male-dominated art movement of Les Automatistes in Montreal, Letendre sought to break away from the group, seeking her own visual identity. Upon travelling to Long Beach, California for a large-scale mural commission, the traditional methods of machismo-impasto surfaces were deemed impractical. Influenced by the California Light & Space movement, Rita employed airbrush acrylics to build luminous, iridescent fields of colour.