Leopold Plotek

Painter Leopold Plotek draws his references, among other things, from Antiquity, mythology, sacred texts, and Jewish mysticism. At the start of his career, while seeking his way in modernism, he travelled to Italy, where he immersed himself in Western architectural traditions. Constantly blurring the line between abstraction and figuration, foreground and background, memory and experience, consciousness and the unconscious, Plotek was not trying to reproduce or reinterpret the past so much as to invent a grande maniera for our time.

Plotek was born in Moscow, USSR, in 1948. He emigrated from Poland to Canada in 1960. During his studies, first at McGill University and Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University), in Montreal, then at the Slade School of Fine Art, in London, he had among his teachers Roy Kiyooka, Yves Gaucher, and William Townsend. He has had close to thirty solo exhibitions in Montreal and Toronto since 1976, and his works figure in the major Canadian public collections. He lives and works in Montreal, where he also teaches painting and drawing at Concordia University. He is represented by Corkin Gallery in Toronto.