Marcel Barbeau, OC OQ RCA (February 18, 1925 – January 2, 2016) was a Canadian painter, sculptor, graphic and performance artist who used different forms of abstraction and art techniques and technology to express himself.

With them, he signed the Refus Global in 1948[2] because he and the other signatories wanted to be free of formal structures - a movement which extended far beyond painting.

In 1969, the Winnipeg Art Gallery in collaboration with the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, held a retrospective exhibition of his work.

[3] Curiosity led Barbeau to study the main contemporary artistic trends originating from other disciplinary fields.

His interest in those art forms encouraged him to draw on their structures in order to find some convergences, connivances, anchor points or to confirm aesthetic intuitions.

[3] He even created works that fall under these disciplines such as his phonic chants from the mid-eighties, which appear in the portrait film by Manon Barbeau entitled "Barbeau, Libre comme l’art"; his dance-action paintings from the seventies; the choreography he created for the opening dance part of his exhibit at Domaine Cataraqui (1999).