As an artist, Claudine Ascher employs different techniques using various materials such as graphite and coloured pencils, collage and especially clay. Her images often involve the living model, nature and elements of everyday life, and refer to realist, surrealist, interpretive and ‘magic’ realism. She draws her themes from her personal experiences and from testimonies. Her work seeks broader psychological and philosophical implications of often contradictory cultural concepts.
Through her experience as a multilingual and multiple-time immigrant, Claudine Ascher is today also a person created by the convergence of her three artistic paths: artist, curator, and teacher. One could say that she is like a mixed media work, because what binds all these activities together for her, what creates peace between them, is creation. As a professional artist, as a teacher of art, as a gallery administrator and curator, both independently and for not-for-profit art centres, multicultural equals multidisciplinary. What matters to her in all her roles is freedom of expression, expert and intentional practice, and open, informed and respectful exchange.
Claudine Ascher has been exhibiting in solo and group shows in Canada and beyond since 1983. she has taught aspects of art technique and practice since 1976 and created exhibitions since 1984, especially as Director/Curator of Galerie de la Ville of the Dollard Centre for the Arts from 1988 to 2020. She holds a Master of Arts (2006) and a Bachelor of Visual Arts (1983) from Concordia University and a Teaching Diploma (1976) and a Bachelor of Art (Distinction, 1974) from McGill University.
