Guido Molinari was born in Montreal in 1933. The son of a musician, he developed an interest in the arts at a very early age. At the age of fifteen, he took his first art classes at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal (1948-50) under the direction of Marian Scott and Gordon Weber, and then went on to study at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ School of Art and Design (1951).

Molinari founded and headed the Galerie l'Actuelle in 1955, the first gallery in Canada to be devoted exclusively to abstract art. During this period, Guido Molinari was heavily influenced by the works of Mondrian and Malevich, and became involved with the Automatistes. The fifties brought him closer to the Plasticiens, a group interested in simple geometric forms. He participated in the Montreal Place des artistes exhibit, exhibiting three paintings, a few poems, and his first sculpture. Molinari’s works were also included in the Espace 55 exhibit, organized by Gilles Corbeil at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in April 1955. The following year, he founded the Non-figurative Artists Association. He taught at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ School of Art and Drawing from 1963 to 1965. From 1970 to 1997, he taught painting and drawing at Montreal’s Concordia University.

Molinari represented Canada at the Second Coltejer Biennial in Medellin, Colombia. In 1970, he participated in the third Salon international des Galeries pilotes in Lausanne, Switzerland and, on December 12, 1970, was one of eight Canadian artists to participate in the Canadian exhibit at the Tel-Aviv Museum. Molinari presented his series of paintings entitled Oppositions Triangulaires at the Canadian Cultural Centre in November 1974, as well as at the London Canada House Gallery in February 1975. In 1976-77, the National Gallery of Canada organized a retrospective of his works (1951-1973), which then toured to Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Molinari participated in the Symposium des peintres du Québec in La Rochelle, France in 1980. A retrospective of his drawings was organized in 1981 by the Agnes-Etherington Art Gallery at Queen’s University (Ontario) and was also displayed at Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain in 1982. This same museum put on an important retrospective of Molinari’s works in the summer of 1995 that later toured to Guelph, Regina and Halifax. In 1998, the Musée de Grenoble invited Molinari to mount a major retrospective, which was also exhibited at the Musée de Château-Villeneuve in Vence, France. In October 1998, a series of dynamic recent works (the checkerboards and homages to Mondrian) was displayed at Toronto’s Wynick Tuck Gallery, and the exhibit was remounted at Montreal’s Galerie Eric Devlin in May 1999. Since the foundation of the Quatuor Molinari in 1997 and until just before is passing in 2004, Guido Molinari has opened his studio to the public three times a year for the Dialogues à l'Atelier, which bring together the painters, composers and musicians of Montreal’s contemporary art scene.

Numerous and important honours have been bestowed upon Guido Molinari: he has received the Jessie Dow Award at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Spring Salon (1962), the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts Award (1965), the Guggenheim Foundation Scholarship (1967), and the David E. Bright Foundation Award at the 1968 Venice Biennial. From 1967 to 1968, he was Vice-President of the Association des artistes professionnels du Québec and member of the Société internationale d'esthétique expérimentale. Molinari was elected member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts in 1964 and received the Government of Quebec’s Paul-Emile Borduas prize in 1980.

Also a writer and a poet, Molinari’s writings on art were published by the National Gallery of Canada in 1976. The year 1979 saw the publication of Nul Mot, a volume of Molinari’s poems and etchings. In April 1999, he published a second collection of poems entitled Ça.

Jean Portugais, based on documents provided by Claire Molinari.