Born in 1952, has lived and worked in Montreal since 1972
After completing Post-Graduate studies at Goldsmiths College in London, England, Richard-Max Tremblay has worked mainly in painting and photography. Throughout the 1980’s and 90’s, his work was shown in numerous venues, notably at the Centre Culturel canadien à Paris (1992) and the Galerie d’art des Services culturels de la Délégation générale du Québec (1988) also in Paris.
From 1993 to 1998 he was co-writer, co-producer and cinematographer of two documentary videos: Gugging, which explores the relationship between Outsider Art and mainstream modern and contemporary art, and André Markowicz, la voix d’un traducteur, about the celebrated Russian-French translator of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s entire oeuvre.
Tremblay’s multidisciplinary approach has allowed him to explore the relationship between painting, photography and video, and led him to co-curate, with Louise Provencher, Montréal-Télégraphe: le son iconographe, an exhibition project that placed art and science in dialogue. In 2005, he presented Avant l’oubli, a suite of 52 black and white paintings, at the Joyce Yahouda Gallery in Montreal.
Two exhibitions Inadvertances and Contretemps, took place following a residency at VU PHOTO (Centre de diffusion et de production) in Quebec City in 2003. In 2011, a second residency at VU led to the exhibition Des Fenêtres.
Also in 2011, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts featured Tête-à-tête: portraits d’artistes, an exhibition of photographic portraits coinciding with the publication of Richard-Max Tremblay: Portrait, a monograph written by André Lamarre and published by Les éditions du passage.
His recent exhibitions Hors Champ II (painting) in 2014, and Déboîtements (photography) in 2015, concern the fragility of memory and of archives. His work over a span of 40 years has evolved around ideas of absence and loss and of what is obscured or hidden. In 2014, he was awarded a four-month residency at the Canada Council for the Arts Paris studio. This provided him with the opportunity to visit Berlin and Venice, resulting in his most recent show, Caché at Division Gallery in Montreal (2017), an exhibition representing a synthesis of the artistic concerns that have informed his practice over several decades.