Born in Montreal on June 30, 1932, Alan Glass began his artistic training at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal in 1949, under the guidance of Alfred Pellan. In 1952, a French scholarship allowed him to continue his studies in Paris, where he attended the Beaux-Arts, the School of the Musée de l’Homme, and the Sorbonne. There, he produced automatic drawings that caught the attention of André Breton, who, along with Benjamin Péret, organized his first solo exhibition in 1958 at the Galerie Le Terrain Vague.
Connected to the surrealist circle (Aube Breton Elléouët, Jean Benoît, Mimi Parent, Alejandro Jodorowsky), he discovered Mexico in 1962 and settled there permanently in 1963. From the 1960s onward, he abandoned drawing to devote himself to “box assemblages,” true surrealist reliquaries filled with objects gathered over time arranged in a poetics of layering and wonder. His art also draws on visual references from Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray, and Henri Rousseau. His body of work is marked by a remarkable diversity of media, ranging from collages and watercolours to printmaking, painting, and handcrafted objects.
Among his major exhibitions are the one at Galerie Antonio Souza (Mexico, 1967), two retrospectives at the Museo de Arte Moderno (1976, 2008), and shows in Paris and Montreal (Galerie 1900–2000, Galerie Gilles Corbeil). In 2025, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is dedicating a major retrospective to him, Worlds and Wonders: The Surreal Journey of Alan Glass, in partnership with the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes.
His works are included in prestigious collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d’art moderne de Paris, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Alan Glass passed away in Mexico City on January 16, 2023.
