Ron Moppett

Ron Moppett
Born	Ron Benjamin Moppett (1945-03-12)March 12, 1945 Woking, Surrey, England
Nationality	English-born Canadian
Education	Alberta College of Art and Design, Calgary (1963 to 1967); Instituto de Allende, San Miguel Allende, Mexico (1968)
Known for	painter, curator, gallery director, teacher
Awards	Canada Council grants; Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (1986); Gershon Iskowitz Prize (1997); Alberta Centennial Medal, 2005
Elected	2002 Member, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts

Ronald Benjamin Moppett RCA (born March 12, 1945) is a Canadian painter. He is known primarily for abstract paintings and for works in which he combines paint and collage, along with non-traditional materials. Moppett is based in Calgary, Alberta.

Biography

Moppett was born in England on March 12, 1945, the eldest of four children, and immigrated to Calgary with his family in 1957. He has worked at different times as a curator, gallery director and teacher while pursuing a career as a painter.

Selected exhibitions

Moppett has been exhibiting since 1966. In 1982, a retrospective of his work was shown at the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre. In 1988, he showed recent work with the 49th Parallel Centre for Contemporary Art, New York and in 1990, Katharine Ylitalo for the Glenbow Museum in Calgary organized Painting Nature with a Mirror; Ron Moppett, 1974-1989, a travelling exhibition.

THESAMEWAYBETTER/READER (2012), a mosaic mural by Moppett, located in Downtown East Village, Calgary.

In 2010, Moppett showed his work in two group exhibitions, Triumphant Carrot: The Persistence of Still Life, at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia, and Roadmap: Starting Points and Side Roads in Building a Collection, the Nickle Arts Museum, Calgary, Alberta. In 2015, his sculpture and installation work was exhibited in a large survey at the Nickle Arts Museum titled Ron Moppett: Sculptur(al). In 2016, the Art Gallery of Alberta exhibited Damian Moppett + Ron Moppett: (every story has two sides). In 2017, the National Gallery of Canada curated a two-person show of Moppett and his son Damian Moppett, in its Masterpiece in Focus series.

In 2020, curator Mark Lanctôt in an exhibition titled Painting Nature with a Mirror (he used the name of Moppett`s earlier show) at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal created a portrait of Canadian painting in the 1980s which included Moppett among its artists.

Moppett has also created a mural, THESAMEWAYBETTER/READER, made of more than 950,000 mosaic tiles for Calgary's East Village (2012). Commissioned by the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation, the mural is 110 feet long. It is the largest free-standing mosaic mural in Canada.

Awards

• 1986 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award;
• 1997 Gershon Iskowitz Prize;
• 2005 Alberta Centennial Medal;
• 2022 Honorary MFA recipient from AU;

Collections

• The Canada Council Art Bank Collection
• Edmonton Art Gallery
• Glenbow Museum, Calgary
• MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina
• Musée d'art contemporain, Montreal
• National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
• Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary
• University of Lethbridge

Sources

• MacDonald, Colin (1967). A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, vol. 4 (Third ed.). Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd. ISBN 0-919554-13-X. Retrieved June 14, 2020.

Further reading

• Nasgaard, Roald. Abstract Painting in Canada. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2008. ISBN 1-55365-394-7
• Tousley, Nancy (2016). An Interview with Damian Moppett and Ron Moppett. Damian Moppett + Ron Moppett: (every story has two sides). Edmonton: Art Gallery of Alberta. Retrieved February 23, 2023.