Léopold L. Foulem
Léopold L. Foulem (Canadian, b. 1945)
Blue Willow Teapot in Mounts, 1997-1999
ceramic and found objects
H with handle: 9”
The Dinnerware Museum, Gift of the Artist, 2013.36
"My ceramics are about art and ceramics, and utlimately about ceramics as art...I believe that genuine art is about concepts and indisputably neither about medium nor style, nor even about making." (Quote from Léopold L. Foulem, excerpted from Camp Fires: the Queer Baroque of Léopold L. Foulem, Paul Mathieu, Richard Milette, curated with essay by Robin Metcalfe, 2014.)
Montréal ceramist Léopold L. Foulem’s distinguished career spans more than thiry-five years, with over 50 solo exhibitions and more than 230 group shows in five continents. His ceramics were exhibited in forty-nine museums. He is the winner of the prestigious Jean A. Chalmers National Craft Award (1999) and the Prix Saidy Bronfman Award (2001) and the Prix Éloize/Artist of the Year in the visual arts in Acadia (2003).
Foulem’s work is represented in numerous private and public collections, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Gardiner Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Shigaraki Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. In 2010 he was invited to present a one-person exhibition at the XXIe Biennale Internationale de Vallauris in France.
The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec presented the first comprehensive retrospective of his work in 2013.
Foulem taught ceramics for more than twenty years at the Cégep du Vieux Montréal, and fine arts from 1994 until 20-13 at teh Cégep de Satin-Laurent.
Léopold L. Foulem is also a world authority on Picasso’s ceramics, which he has researched for more than thirty years. His scholarship on this subject led to the 2004 exhibition Picasso and Ceramics, held successively at Musée national des beaux-arts du Quebec, at the Gardiner Museum, and Musée Picasso oin Antibes, France.
He has lectured extensively on the subject of ceramics as an autonomous entry art form; many were published.
excerpted from Camp Fires: the Queer Baroque of Léopold L. Foulem, Paul Mathieu, Richard Milette, curated with essay by Robin Metcalfe, 2014, and courtesy of the Gardiner Museum, Toronto.