Quebec Museum Opens $61 Million Pavilion Devoted to Painter Jean Paul Riopelle

The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in Quebec City has opened a new pavilion dedicated to Jean Paul Riopelle, the abstract painter often described as the province’s best-known modern artist, completing a project whose budget more than doubled after it was first announced in 2022.

The Espace Riopelle, formally the Michael Audain Pavilion, cost 84 million Canadian dollars, or about $61 million, according to the museum and The Art Newspaper. The museum says the building officially opened on Oct. 21. Construction began in May 2024.

Designed by the Quebec firm Les Architectes FABG, which won an architectural competition for the commission, the three-story building has more than 5,000 square meters of space. The Art Newspaper reported that its design evokes Riopelle’s rustic home studio, and that it offers views of the Plains of Abraham and the St. Lawrence River, with two covered outdoor terraces and landscaping that uses plants from the boreal forest.

At the heart of the building is a circular gallery made for ‘L’Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg,’ a 40-meter-long triptych Riopelle completed in 1992, which will be on permanent display. The pavilion has room for four exhibitions, including a large survey of Riopelle’s career, from his years with the Automatistes through his abstract paintings of the 1950s and later prints. The museum owns more than 500 works by Riopelle and plans to show more than 130 of them in the new space.

Riopelle, who lived from 1923 to 2002, is known for building up thick, mosaic-like surfaces with a palette knife. The philanthropist Michael Audain, a co-founder of the Jean Paul Riopelle Foundation, told The Art Newspaper that Riopelle was arguably Canada’s most internationally known artist and among the first to paint entire landscapes with a knife alone.

The project was financed by a mix of public and private money. The Quebec government contributed more than 40 million Canadian dollars, and the Riopelle foundation provided at least 20 million and led the effort, The Art Newspaper reported. Audain and his wife, Yoshiko Karasawa, along with the mining executive Pierre Lassonde, donated more than 60 works by Riopelle and his contemporaries. Counting the value of those works, Audain’s contribution exceeds 90 million Canadian dollars, which the publication called one of the largest cultural gifts in Quebec’s history. The museum also lists the City of Quebec and its own foundation among its partners.

The pavilion’s budget more than doubled between its announcement and its completion, a reminder of how costly such projects have become. The museum’s director, Jean-Luc Murray, said the institution had long wanted to make Riopelle’s work more accessible and described the building as creating an interplay between nature, architecture and Riopelle’s larger-than-life work.

The museum says the project fulfills a wish Riopelle expressed in the 1980s for a foundation on the site.