Jean Paul Riopelle is a Canadian Automatist painter, engraver and sculptor.

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At a very young age, his father entrusted him to the artist Henri Bisson, a drawing teacher, whom he met every Saturday for ten years to paint landscapes, characters and still lifes.

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The death of his younger brother in 1930 left a deep impression on the artist, who would express his pain in his work. In 1947, he moved to Paris, where he met the Surrealists, led by André Breton. Riopelle deploys a rich and varied work, oscillating in a completely new way between abstraction and figuration and experimenting with several techniques, brushes, impasto, paint projections, paint projections, knives or spatulas. In 1955, the Canadian met the artist Joan Mitchell, with whom he then shared his life for nearly twenty-five years.

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In 1991, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts devoted an exceptional retrospective to Riopelle's work. La Jean-Paul Riopelle Foundation was created in 2019 in order to make the artist's work and, more generally, contemporary Canadian art accessible to all.