If you find yourself in Venice this summer you may want to drop by the Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi to take a look at Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, running until December 3^rd, 2017. The exhibition operates on the conceit that the works on display were discovered in a 2000 year old wreck that Damien Hirst discovered on the floor of the Indian Ocean and raised at his own expense. According to a review published in The Guardian on April 16^th, 2017 by Laura Cumming, the show is: “by turns marvellous and beautiful, prodigious, comic and monstrous.”

Hirst has filled his extravaganza with hundreds of pieces made from marble, gold, bronze, crystal, jade and malachite. Throughout the show are references to his past work and other artists work which raise questions about reality and myth and the worth of an art work.

Summer 2017

Emily Carr: Into the Forest opens on May 13^th and runs until March 4^th, 2018 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. As you would image the exhibition’s subject matter is the West Coast forest and Carr’s relationship with it, as shown in 45 paintings. The gallery’s Senior Curator-Historical, Ian M. Thom says that, “by confronting the forest directly, Carr celebrated the natural world through her masterful images of the coastal forest landscape. Through her unique synthesis of the spiritual and natural, Carr’s forest paintings have shaped the way British Columbians perceive their natural surroundings.”

In 1935 Carr wrote: “Sketching in the big woods is wonderful. You go, find a space wide enough to sit in and clear enough so that the undergrowth is not drowning you. Everything is green. Everything is waiting and still. Slowly things begin to move, to slip in their places. Groups and masses and lines tie themselves together. Colours you had not noticed come out timidly or boldly… Here is a picture, a complete thought and there another and there…”

Summer 2017

The Glenbow in Calgary is showing Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience by Kent Monkman from June 17^th through to September 10^th, 2017. The exhibit is Monkman’s gift to the sesquicentennial and offers a revised view of Canadian history through indigenous eyes. It should be well worth seeing.

Summer 2017

During this year of celebration it should come as no surprise that Ottawa is upping its game and a lot has been going on at the National Gallery. First, the Canadian, Indigenous and Canadian photographic galleries have been renovated and reorganized in a bid to make the viewing experience a more fluid one. The idea has been to integrate all three to provide both sides of the picture, both Indigenous and settler.

The entire shebang has been put together under the rubric of Our Masterpieces, Our Stories and will open on June 15^th and will feature almost 1000 works of art. For the sesquicentennial the Canadian and Indigenous galleries will begin with art from 2,000 years ago ends with abstract painting in the 1960s. In other galleries the museum will be showcasing Canadian and Indigenous art from 1968 to the present. The Canadian Photography Institute, a division o the National Gallery will also be mounting an exhibit of Canadian photography from 1968 to the present.

Well, if you ever wanted a crash course on all the glories of Canadian art you now know where to go.

Summer 2017

Art lovers rejoice, Georgia O’Keeffe has come to Canada, or at least to Toronto. From April 23^rd to July 30^th 2017, the Art Gallery of Ontario is setting The world ablaze with Georgia O’Keeffe. It is the first major retrospective of this influential artist to appear in Canada. The show consists of 80 works done over six decades.

While O’Keeffe is mostly known for her florals and skulls, she worked in a variety of styles including abstraction, and painted New York skyscrapers and New Mexico landscapes. She has been recognized as the Mother of American modernism.

As for the flowers, “I hate flowers, I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.” Her abstract flowers are often thought of as being female genitalia but she denied this. This erotic train of thought was encouraged however by the nude and sensuous photographs that her husband Alfred Stieglitz took and exhibited of her.

In 1946 she became the first female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. “Men put me down as the best woman artist… I think I am one of the best painters.” In 2014 her painting “Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1,” painted in 1932 was sold at auction for $44.4 million, and holds the record for the most expensive painting by a female artist sold at auction.

Summer 2017

The MNBAQ in Quebec City is running Philippe Halsman: Astonish Me! from June 15^th, to September 4^th, 2017. It seems just the right sort of thing for a nice summer day. Halsman is the photographer who invented “jumpology” the art of taking portraits of people who are jumping into the air. “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed to the act of jumping and the mask falls so the real person appears,” said Halsman. He also took the photograph that shows Alfred Hitchcock with a cigar dangling from his mouth and a bird perched on the end of the cigar. Halsman collaborated with Salvador Dali for more than 30 years and produced 101 Life Magazine covers.

Summer 2017

The museum’s flagship show this summer is another one of those pop culture wingdingers, Revolution: “You Say You Want A Revolution,” running from June 17^th to October 8^th 2017. The exhibition takes a look at the 1960s in all its various shapes and sounds from music, fashion film, design and activism: From swinging London to the Black Panthers and of course drugs and Woodstock.

The show consists of more than 350 items ranging from clothes, posters, albums, photographs and numerous archival documents. It comes equipped with high fidelity headphones so that museum goers can hear the different sounds of the 60s as they move from gallery to gallery. Originally created at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is using it to celebrate Expo 67.

Summer 2017

It may be the 150^th anniversary of Confederation but it also happens to be the 375^th anniversary of the founding of Montreal and the 50^th anniversary of Expo 67 and to celebrate it all the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has turned the one kilometre distance between the museum on Sherbrooke and McGill University into an open air museum which it has named La Balade pour La Paix , which will run for five months from June 5^th to October 29^th, 2017.

The art work decorating Sherbrooke St. consists of some 200 national flags, including the flags of Canada at Confederation, the provinces and the territories. As well, on display will be 29 sculptures and installations from international and Canadian artists including Joe Fafard, Fernando Botero and Alexander Calder. Some 40 large scale photographs will also be displayed en route. There will also be 67 works bearing messages of peace and humanism. The whole thing has been designed to make you feel as if you were engaged in a 1960s peace march.

Having said all this, the standout piece for me will be the 63 foot, more or less, totem pole carved by Kwakiutl artist Charles Joseph to pay homage to the Mohawks of Kanewake, on whose ancestral land the City of Montreal perches. The work’s title is Residential School Totem Pole and the work is dedicated to all the indigenous children who between 1820 and 1996 were torn from their parents, taken to schools run by religious orders and told they could never speak their native language again. It is a symbol of reconciliation and commemoration and is completely beautiful.

Summer 2017

François Faucher

Great Encounters

With their chromatic intensity and figurative spatial organisation, François Faucher’s paintings are permeated with soaring lyricism. His exceptional body of work, resolutely lively, appears to be dancing to its own musical score. The artist has invented a unique technique which incorporates a vibrational effect to the painted elements that approximates musical art. The resulting overall ambience is one of movement and vibrant warmth. Behold an artist who is celebrating forty years of artistic creation.

Born in Thetford Mines, in 1959, François Faucher has always loved to draw. As a youngster he is gifted with a starter painting set which sets him on the path of creation. From the age of 16, he exhibits his works annually. But, despite his growing interest, he is not yet considering a professional artistic career. He rather chooses architecture, which he practices on the lower north-shore for six years. Then, while one day listening to Claude Dubois’ melancholic rendering of the “Blues du businessman”, he experiences a burst of passion for the arts and, at 40 years old, he quits his practice to pursue his artistic career. Never having stopped painting, François Faucher is a self-taught artist who has participated in Albert Rousseau’s famous open workshops and is inspired by Iacurto, Le Sauteur, Picasso and Van Gogh.  Abonnez-vous au contenu de notre site internet pour lire ce texte. Subscribe to our Website content to read more

Text by Isabelle Gauthier

Canadian Galleries: Symbole Art (Montréal), Jutras Art Gallery (Toronto).

Lynn Garceau

On Exhibit

Having been raised in a family of artists, it was foreseeable that painting would someday be part of Lynn Garceau’s life. A more than likely prospect indeed as she believes the discipline has literally chosen her and that she would have been unable to follow a different path. She is however in her early thirties when the call becomes really insistent, pressing her to devote more of her time to art, with ever increasing ardour. Passionate about flowers, tulips, peonies and poppies are prominent in her paintings, sometimes depicted in close-up, sometimes as part of a spanning panorama that allows for a quasi-abstract treatment.

“I can’t imagine my life without flowers. It’s a penchant that runs in our family, transmitted from one generation to the next. This theme is part of my life and is certainly here to stay, especially since there is such a quantity of locations when we can watch them bloom.” Starting with La Mauricie National Park where she’s been going every week for a very long time, the Annual Tulip Festival in Ottawa and the wonderful gardens of Les Hémérocalles de l’Isle, located in Bécancour, that count more than twenty thousand cultivars. She has also been to Algonquin Park, located between Georgian Bay and the Ottawa River in Ontario, kayaking to discover the aquatic flora and the twisted pines that were so well depicted by Tom Thompson. And then there are Monet’s gardens in Giverny, the Alhambra gardens in Spain, as well as Provence where she can follow in Van Gogh’s footsteps. She also visited the Antilles where the light is so different and where she had the opportunity to paint exotic species depicted in flowerpots on smaller sized canvasses.  Abonnez-vous au contenu de notre site internet pour lire ce texte. Subscribe to our Website content to read more

Text by Lisanne Le Tellier

Lynn Garceau’s works are available in the following galleries:

Galerie Bel Art, in Québec City, Galerie Beauchamp in Baie-Saint-Paul, Galerie Le Bourget in Montréal, Galerie Lumière au pinceau in the City of Grand-Mère, Koyman Galleries in Ottawa, Woodlands Gallery in Winnipeg, Galerie Céleste in Saint-Sauveur, Oceanside Art Gallery in British Colombia and Ryan Fine Art Gallery in Port Carling, Ontario.