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It is not unusual to celebrate in a big way someone making it to their 100th birthday, so it’s even more remarkable to mark the centenary of an artist who is still actively creating.

That’s precisely what’s happening at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition I Let Rhythms Flow, which opens Wednesday and runs until Feb. 18, is a homage to the career of multidisciplinary creator Françoise Sullivan, who turned 100 in June. The centrepiece of the show is a selection of paintings she created over the past two years and the works are in the abstract monochromatic style she first began using in the 1980s.

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“Imagine, 80 years of creation, it’s amazing,” said Stéphane Aquin, director of the museum, in his introductory remarks at a news conference Tuesday. “It’s just remarkable that she’s still with us. She is a living national treasure.”

Aquin went on to talk about how she was one of the pioneers of modern dance in Quebec, returning to her home province in the late 1940s after studying dance in New York with, among other teachers, legendary choreographer Martha Graham. Sullivan’s dance piece Danse dans la neige is considered to be a defining moment in the history of performance art here. She performed an improvised dance choreography in crunchy snow near Otterburn Park and several of the striking photos of that performance taken by Maurice Perron are included in the Museum show.

A decade later, she became a sculptor, working with the great Quebec sculptor and painter Armand Vaillancourt, and then she began focusing more on painting in the 1980s. She was one of the signatories of the Refus Global in 1948, a radical call for artistic freedom and an attack on the church-dominated Quebec society at the time, often cited as a precursor to the Quiet Revolution.

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Florence-Agathe Dubé-Moreau, the guest curator on the show, said Sullivan wanted to present her most recent works in the exhibit.

“For me visual arts is the most important form of art,” said Sullivan.

She talked of how climate change has influenced her recent work, as she watches like the rest of us as the planet is battered by extreme weather.

“For me it was impossible to not try to grapple with what’s happening in the world,” said Sullivan.

When asked about that theme in the paintings in the exhibit, Aquin suggested there was something almost apocalyptic in the painting Annunciator of the Moons, from 2022.

“Maybe I’m reading more into it than there is,” said Aquin, pointing to the tableau that has a bright splashy line of red through the middle of it.

“It looks like blood dripping,” said Sullivan.

Dubé-Moreau added that there has always been a social-political element to Sullivan’s life and work, dating all the way back to the Refus Global, saying Sullivan uses art as “a motor of transformation”.

“Our Refus Global was a powerful (statement),” said Sullivan.

Aquin and Dubé-Moreau spent time with Sullivan in her studio in her country home near the Rivière Rouge in the Laurentians.

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“She really works surrounded by nature,” said Aquin. “She’s in an old-style cabin. I think she felt these changes. And of course she reads the news. And it permeates in the mood of some of these paintings. The one on the left is quite apocalyptic with this red lava bursting through the green. It’s just her sensitivity to nature overall that has always been there in all her works.”

Aquin noted that it’s been 20 years since the last exhibit at the same museum featuring Sullivan’s work — a show curated by Aquin — and 60 years since the first Sullivan show there.

“We at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts have been supporting her since 1963,” said Aquin. “The first show we did with her was in 1963. She partnered with (Canadian abstract painter) Jack Bush on a show. We also dedicated a retrospective to her work in 2003, which was 40 years after, and 60 years after, in 2023, we have her recent work, put in the context of her past work. And I think what surfaces and becomes very clear is how coherent her work is from start to finish. In her sensitivity, in her responsiveness to inspiration, to movement, to presence, whether it’s through dance, sculpture, mixed media, performances or paintings. There’s an amazing availability of her mind to the world around her. She’s still all with us … she made these paintings herself, with no assistant.”

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Dubé-Moreau said it was an incredible experience to spend time watching Sullivan at work in her workshops, one in the city and one in the Laurentians.

“The new paintings are really in the same vein as the large-scale monochromatic paintings that she’s done in the past,” said Dubé-Moreau. “The light, the colour. Others you can feel the rhythm, the rapid-fire painting strokes. That’s what I find fascinating about these paintings. We feel all of Françoise’s energy. It’s so impressive to see her in her workshops, in front of these immense paintings.”

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