Pierre Granche
Hommage aux travailleurs
1973
© Succession Pierre Granche / CARCC Ottawa 2023
Crédit photo: Snejanka Popova, 2013
Presentation of the artwork
Situated at the intersection of Henri-Bourassa and Léger boulevards, the artwork is an abstract sculpture made of white-painted concrete. It is composed of two elements, the first of which is a column formed of five superimposed polyhedrons. They are composed of concave and convex planes three of which have square openings in the centre. The second element, a similar volume situated between the cube and the octahedron, one plane of which is concave, is placed beside the column. In his early artworks, as can be seen in Hommage aux travailleurs, Granche was interested in modular systems and stacks. “Bringing out the sensuality of forms, the intelligence of stacks and the underlying systems seemed to me to be a way to establish basic communication with the viewer or collaborator. I imagined them as curious, capable of experimentation and adaptation to new morphological languages.”1
1. Pierre Granche quoted in Gaston Saint-Pierre, “Pierre Granche, Entrevue,” Espace sculpture, No. 42 (1997–98), 21–22 (our translation).
Associated events
As its title indicates, the artwork pays tribute to workers.
Pierre Granche
Sculptor Pierre Granche was born in Montréal in 1948 and died in 1997. He studied at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal, then at the Université de Vincennes, in Paris. For more than 20 years, he taught at the Université de Montréal, in the visual arts department of which he was one of the founders. Over the course of this career, he produced numerous works of public art, including Comme si le temps… de la rue (1992), commissioned when the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal moved to Rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, and Système (1979–82), installed in the Namur Métro station. He also created the Canada Memorial in Green Park, London.
