Our first laboratory was founded by Géza Biro around 1970 after relocating to Montréal from his native Hungary where he had worked as painting conservator at the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts  for many years. 

Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Atelier Biro, as it was first called in the 1970's, was the beginning of  what later became an established family-run conservation laboratory. Within  a few years, the laboratory was re-christened to Center for Art Restoration. The firm served private collectors, art dealers and many institutions until 1990 when Géza Biro retired. 

Laszlo Biro received his early training in painting conservation from his father over  years of  apprenticeship. Now with over three decades of experience he tackles some of the most challenging conservation projects. Numerous major artists' works have passed under his hands from the Italian Renaissance to the 20th century. His collaboration with his brother Peter Paul continues beyond their father's retirement. Laszlo is an accomplished researcher - his background in art history and cultural history makes him especially valuable when searching a painting's past in attempting to confirm or deny a proposed attribution. He is credited with a number of important discoveries, including a previously unknown St. Jerome by Jusepe Ribera. Since the early 1990s, he has collaborated on major projects such as the much celebrated and publicized case of Horton's Jackson Pollock painting as well as on the world-wide front page news J. M. W. Turner case. He has given numerous press and media interviews in connection with conservation and authorship issues.

Peter Paul Biro was first to take advantage of human contact marks on a painting for identification. He has been successful in authenticating a J.M.W. Turner canvas having matched fingerprints left on it by the artist. The case, the first of its kind, brought him worldwide acclaim. Since then, Paul specializes in solving some of the most challenging authentication cases, while building the first ever database of artist’s fingerprints. His methodology and assistance has been requested by such organizations as the FBI, by major universities, art collectors and scholars. He has performed forensic examinations of paintings in museums and collections around the world. Paul has published in journals including Mankind Quarterly and Antiquity and most recently in the Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society, Oxford, entitled Forensics and Microscopy in Authenticating works of Art. Paul is also an accomplished microscopist with 30 years of experience in identifying painting materials principally through polarized light microscopy. His expertise in digital imaging and image processing has resolved numerous attribution issues. Under preparation is a first ever manual on forensic examination of works art. He is presently completing his cataloguing of J. M. W. Turner’s fingerprints in the Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London. Paul has given lectures at Harvard University, the University of Toronto, for The American Appraisers Association, Yale Club, New York, the Royal Microscopical Society, National Portrait Gallery, London, and the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and has been invited to speak at the Canadian Identification Society’s annual meeting in Montreal ( www.cis-sci.ca ). He has given interviews for major newspapers; The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Observer, Los Angeles Times, The Age (Australia), Globe and Mail, (Canada) are among some of them. He has appeared on primetime television discussing his work on  BBC, CNN, CBC, NBC and Swedish National Television.

Paul’s discoveries have been the focus of a feature length documentary  produced by New Line Cinema and Harry Moses (longtime producer of CBS 60 Minutes) entitled Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock.  The film is now distributed internationally. He has also contributed to a Discovery Channel special on Leonardo da Vinci examining fingerprint evidence on a recently proposed Leonardo painting. The program started airing in May 2006 entitled Da Vinci’s Lost Code. His work has successfully connected the painting to Leonardo’s workshop and solved the puzzle Leonardo scholars faced for decades.

In 2006, Paul joined the Pigmentum Project, Oxford University, bringing about the convergence of scientific and forensic methodologies in authentication while unifying currently disjointed disciplines.

In 2009, he became a co-founder of Art Access & Research Inc., a research  laboratory with facilities in London, U.K., and Montreal, Canada.