Leopold Plotek makes paintings that interrogate the boundaries of the abstract and figurative, memory and experience, subconscious and intellect. A protégé of the Plasticien artist Yves Gaucher, Plotek spent the early years of his career grappling with his place in the “stream of modernism.” A summer in Italy proved fruitful: the painter returned to Montréal with “an urgent desire to capture something of the  feeling    I had undergone” while immersed in the architectural traditions of Western culture.

Having since established himself as one of Québec’s leading painters, Plotek continues to be inspired by the “forms that offered themselves to be encountered and responded to at the deepest levels of my imagination.” His large-scale canvases reframe the Western canon as an object of personal experience, expressing his own engagement with its architecture, objects, artists, and philosophers – often to comment on civilization’s enduring    folly.

Born in 1948 in Moscow, USSR,  Plotek emigrated to Canada from Warsaw, Poland in 1960. The artist was educated at McGill University and Sir George Williams University, Montréal, where he studied under Gaucher and Roy Kiyooka; and at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, under William Townsend.