JOAN BALZAR

BIO

Joan Balzar (1928-2016) was foundational to the development of abstraction and conceptualism in British Columbia. Raised in Victoria, Balzar also lived in South America, Mexico and Guatemala, where her work was featured in major exhibitions throughout her career. From the 1950s, she was fascinated by the atomic age and electronic communication, incorporating neon, aluminum and plexiglass in her paintings. Working with the then-avant-garde medium of neon lighting (which also has a significant history unique to Vancouver), Balzar took it one step further by incorporating these luminous tubes into the body of her paintings. Channeling this material vibrancy, her large-scale “X” and “W” series of paintings project the illusion of three-dimensional relief sculpture, as one might read a neon sign, despite being two-dimensional works on canvas. Her pieces include materials such as acrylic, wood, neon tubing, and electronic transformers on canvas.

Balzar studied with painters (Jack Shadboldt, Joe Plaskett, Peter Aspell, Roy Kiyooka and Don Jarvis) at the Vancouver School of Art (Emily Carr University). This group of Canadian artists achieved early success in the 1960s, with expansively scaled, hard-edge abstract paintings and later, through their conceptual explorations.

“I will always remember how he told me that when you put one colour next to another you should create a kind of spontaneous combustion,” Balzar later said of Jack Shadbolt. Taking his advice to heart, her use of colour in material form lead to vibrant abstract illusions, where her Op Art canvases are intensely bright and sophisticated. Op Art was an international art movement that emerged in the 1960s, and was actively embraced by a dynamic group of Vancouver artists of which Balzar was included. This new form of art celebrated instability, transformation and movement—evoked by both the optical phenomena occurring within a composition, and by the physical movement of the viewer in front of the artworks.

Balzar belongs to a pivotal moment in West Coast art history when abstraction absorbed the language of media, technology, and aerospace rather than purely formalist concerns. While her peers in Toronto and Montreal were engaged in the hard-edge and Plasticien movements, Balzar’s approach in Vancouver was uniquely
inflected by a convergence of new media theory and technological optimism. Her recurrent interactions with Marshall McLuhan—who made regular visits to the West Coast during this time—coincided with her deliberate turn toward luminous chromatic fields and embedded neon lines. Rather than treating painting as a static object, Balzar used neon as a circuit—interrupting and charging the surface like a live signal coursing through the canvas.

These experiments emerged in parallel to the global fascination with space travel in the 1960s, when the cosmos was imagined as the ultimate frontier of human innovation. If artists like Michael Morris translated the new geography of jet travel into his “Letter” series, mapping air routes and communications onto canvas, Balzar internalized that same sense of technological wonder but projected it upward—towards solar radiation, metallic surface, satellite arrays, and the glowing data-streams of a connected world. Her paintings are not only about geometry; they are about broadcasting.

Balzar should be reconsidered today not merely as a regional hard-edge painter, but as one of the earliest Canadian artists to metabolize media theory and space-age aesthetics directly into material practice—years before these concerns were articulated in broader art discourse.

Balzar left Vancouver and moved away from Canada for an extended period of time, to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and then Guatemala. She lost a significant cache of work in the 1970s, when a fire broke out in her West Vancouver home and studio. Some of her paintings and documents were also lost during her travels in Mexico and Central America. However, her surviving body of work—including luminous pieces in the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Seattle Art Museum, West Vancouver Museum, Audain Art Museum in Whistler, and private collections—solidify her place in Canadian art history.

Exhibitions:
Above or Beyond