Born in Switzerland to an academic family, Biéler spent his earliest years in France before emigrating to Canada in 1908 with his family. He enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War at 18 years of age, was wounded and soon after his discharge from the army began to study art in Europe. Studies in the United States, then again in Europe preceded his return to Quebec and Île d’Orléans in the late 1920s, which marked the beginning of a lifelong interest in rural Quebec.

Despite his sophistication and worldliness, Biéler did not pursue pure abstraction. Rather, he deeply and sensitively thought about the components of making an image, often with subject matter drawn from his beloved rural Quebec. His focus on place allowed him to more deeply consider how to render human and animal forms, and geometric forms

The Barnyard is a sun-soaked return to rural life, with a new flock of sheep, and dazzling light that owes much to early twentieth-century French modernism expressed entirely in Biéler’s painterly language.