William Perehudoff: Learn more about the Canadian Colour Field Painter's extraordinary career.

William Perehudoff was a Canadian Colour Field painter from Langham, Saskatchewan. His early work was informed by the Emma Lake Artist’s Workshops he attended with Kenneth Noland and Clement Greenberg in the early 1960s. Greenberg was an influential art critic who advocated for “formalist” painting, which explored colours, forms, textures, and compositional space rather than representation. Perehudoff's long horizontal canvases, brightly saturated colours, and neutral “fields” were informed by American abstraction as well as his Prairie setting.

Along with Jack Bush, Perehudoff was a pioneer of Canadian abstract painting. His works are characterized by brightly saturated shapes on soft fields of colour. The artist once said that "when you listen to music, you hear it, and when you look at abstract painting, you see it.” Perehudoff's works are held in the public collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Glenbow-Alberta Institute, and the Canada Council Art Bank, among other public and private institutions.