If you find yourself in Boston this winter and fancy the art of the renaissance you may want to consider catching Botticelli: Heroines and Heroes at the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum, February 14, 2019 to May 19, 2019. It will be, for one thing, probably the only time, unless you visit Italy, that you will have a chance to see Botticelli’s Story of Virginia, on loan from Italy for the first time and appearing only in Boston.
Botticelli: Heroines and Heroes consists of eight monumental works painted by Botticelli circa 1500 demonstrate the artist’s extraordinary talents as a master storyteller. Botticelli was more than adept at reinventing ancient Roman and early Christian heroines and heroes as renaissance role models transforming their stories of lust, betrayal and vi0lence into parables for a more secular time.
Thanks to loans from the British National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the exhibition has also reunited three out of the four panels telling the tale of the early Christian saint, Zenobius.
Winter 2019
]]>If you happen to find yourself in Vancouver sometime before March 17, 2019 and you have a burning desire to find out how certain pieces of art come to be in a museum and others do not, then you should find you way to the Vancouver Art Gallery where A Curator’s View Ian Thom Selects is in progress.
Ian Thom was the Senior Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery for 33 years and as such was responsible for the acquisition of hundreds of paintings. The audioguide for the exhibit allows Thom the time to explain the process behind the acquisition of paintings and artwork.
The exhibition consists of almost 90 works including paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures. The gallery contains the world’s most significant collection of work by Emily Carr and some of those paintings will be on display as well.
The exhibition features both historical and contemporary work including examples of Pop, abstraction, landscape and portraiture. Local, national and international works of art are on display by artists like Henri Beau, Emily Carr, Robert Davidson, Gathie Falk, Leon Golub, David Hockney, Ann Kipling, Beatrice Lennie, David Milne, Paul Peel, George Segal, Graham Sutherland, Andy Warhol, John Vanderpant and Zacherie Vincent among others.
Winter 2019
]]>If you happen to be in Calgary and want to see the work of a rising Canadian art star and all around agent provacateur you could do no matter than catch the next installment of Kent Monkman’s alter ego Little Miss Chief Testickle.
The Glenbow Museum in Calgary is running Kent Monkman: The Rise and Fall of Civilization starting on February 3, 2019. The work in question is a room filling installation that shows Miss Chief Eagle Tetickle standing on top of a nine foot high replica of a rock-face buffalo jump as sculptural buffalo run through the gallery.
This show should be seen because come on, let’s face it. When was the last time you saw buffalo roaming through a museum. The buffalo jump stands for the sustainable approach to living practised by the First Nations which is implicitly compared to the slaughter of the buffalo as an act of genocide against the indigenous inhabitants, depriving them of the means to feed themselves to open up the land to settlers. Monkman is a painter, performance artist and film maker whose works have appeared in numerous international venues and has been collected by major museum across Canada.
Winter 2019
]]>A new take on Impressionism is taking to the exhibition halls as the Art Gallery of Ontario presents Impressionism in the Age of Industry: Monet Pissarro and More from February 16, 2019 to May 5, 2019.
Developed and mounted by the AGO, the show is the first retrospective to look at the work of some of the world’s greatest Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters through the lens of labour and industry. Impressionism is usually associated with leisure activities and this is the first time that the movement is seen as also celebrating the changes that were taking place in Paris as the city went through industrialization and its painters celebrated the dawn of a new era.
The exhibition showcases more than a hundred works including paintings, sculptures, drawings prints, photographs and films from the era. The show begins circa 1870 and ends with the turn of the century. Art work for the exhibition has been sourced f rom around the globe including key works by Monet from the Musee d’Orsay and the Art Institute of Chicago. Works on display include Camille Pissarro’s Pont Boieldieu in Rouen, Damp Weather, Claude Monet’s Charring Cross Bridge, Fog, Edgar Degas’ Woman at her Bath, and James Tissot’s The Shop Girl.
Winter 2019
]]>Paul Klee enthusiasts should take note because Paul Klee: The Berggruen Collection from the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be running at the National Gallery from November 16, 2018 to March 17, 2019.
It is the first Canadian show dedicated to Klee in nearly forty years. The exhibition is made up of 75 drawings, watercolours and oils and range from his student days in the 1890s to his death in 1940.
Klee is now one of the world’s most popular artists. Although he was often associated with Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism and Abstraction his works are difficult to classify because he largely worked in isolation, putting his own stamp on each idea that he became interested in.
He worked in a variety of mediums. Along with his drawings, watercolours and paintings he also worked in ink, pastel, etching and more. Often he combined media. The materials he used included canvas, burlap, linen, gauze, cardboard, metal foils, fabric, wallpaper and newsprint. Klee was a mixed media king combining oil and watercolour, watercolour with pen and India ink and oil with tempera. He also used spray paint, knife application, stamping, glazing and impasto.
He often felt challenged by colour and spent long periods studying it until he became a master colourist.
Winter 2019
]]>It may be a little late to mention this one, but if you can you really should visit the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art and see Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto which sadly only runs until January 20, 2019. I say sadly because Manifesto appears to be everything that modern art can and should be. It is bold, it blurs lines and it has a lot to say. The exhibition is somewhere between the lines made up of film, performance and installation art.
It questions the nature of art and it deals with modern alienation. But most of all it questions. In form the show is made up of 13 channel immersive video installa- tion and features Australian actress Cate Blanchett playing a variety of roles ranging f rom school teacher, factory worker, homeless man, puppeteer and scientist, among others.
The monologues Blanchett performs, indeed, all the spoken words come from various artists’ manifestos written over the last 150 years. Manifesto draws on manifestos written by Futurists, Dadaists, Fluxus, Suprematists, Situationists and Dogme 95. The words of Claes Oldenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Kazimir Malevitch, Andre Breton, Elaine Sturtevant and Jim Jarmusch are also used.
While Manifesto has toured around the world this is only the second time it can be seen in North America.
Winter 2019
]]>Follow your star
Great Encounters
“To be a painter means modifying one’s senses. Inverse them so as to see with our fingers and touch with our eyes.” – Thomas H. Cook
Being unaffected by a meeting with master painter Albini Leblanc is near impossible, touched as we unfailingly are by his authenticity towards his artistic pursuit. Encounter with a “monument” who never compromises to please the art market and who willingly opens-up to Magazin’Art about his 40 years unwavering passion.
Rue Saint-Jean Baptiste, Sherbrooke, 12 x 24 in
I first interviewed the man at a time when he was living in a majestic ancestral home ideally located facing the St. Lawrence River in St-Jean de l’Île d’Orléans. His eyes and his paintings then reflected the happiness generated by the scrolling landscapes bordering the river, as much as by the reflective ice patches on the narrow Avenue Royale roadway in winter. For this new tête-à-tête, I am meeting with artist Albini Leblanc in his loft-studio located in the heart of Québec City’s artistic sector. An urban location characterized by ancient and stark factories that have been recycled into artists’ workshops, in short the exact opposite to the island’s rural scenery so close to his heart. A lover of the heritage architecture of small Québecois homes waltzing along side-roads as much as of urban street scenes where sunny rays supersede rain and snow, the nomadic artist always follows his star from which he draws inspiration.
Ste Famille D’Orléans, 16 x 20 in
Text by Michel Bois
Images courtesy of Galerie Symbole Art.
Albini Leblanc is represented by:
Galerie Symbole Art, 2770 de Salaberry, Montréal, QC. H3M 1L3 514 336-2332
Galerie Douce-Passion, 42 A, Notre-Dame Street, Québec, QC. G1K 4G1 418 648 – 9292 – [email protected]
Galerie Iris, 30 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Street, Baie-Saint-Paul, QC. G3Z 1L9 418 435-5768
]]>Artist Profile
“The value of an artist is measured not only through the quality of his work, but equally through the degree of love and perseverance he puts into it.” – Cécile Fortier Keays.
A painter’s career that spans some forty years! With parents that attended Québec’s School of Fine-Arts at the same time as Jean-Paul Lemieux, Dallaire and Paul Lacroix. Jacques Hamel has basked in an artistic universe and has been drawing since the age of 5, always curious about his environment. His hand is firm and steadily develops. Decors and happy atmospheres parade in his head like so many Polaroid pictures instantly revealing themselves to the photographer.
Influenced by his parents’ way of life, but largely diverted by them from the perspective of an artistic career, he nevertheless enrolls, in his a late teens, at the Québec School of Fine-Arts which will later become the Laval University Art School. Somewhat disappointed and embittered at not being able to learn in the manner he sees fit the rudiments and basics of painting, he turns his attention towards the theories and knowledge of graphic design. Antoine Dumas and Claude A. Simard will be his distinguished professors.
Parc des Gouverneurs, 16 x 20 in
Text by Michel Bois
Jacques Hamel is represented by the prestigious Galerie Douce-Passion 42A, rue Notre-Dame, Québec.
]]>Fostering Introspection
Delight in Discovery
Driven by an uncommonly intense force of life, Sylvie Drainville creates paintings on wood that attempt to provoke the heart while comforting it, by simultaneous means of made up referents deeply rooted in reality and imaginary parallel systems. Since they adopt empirical rather than classical perspectives, her paintings favor an overall composition consisting of varied superimposed strata reminiscent of the geology of soils.
Lingering eyes are thus able to incrementally penetrate a story that, though universal, becomes personal per one’s interpretation. There is also presence of more intimate areas where one can find shelter and feel safe despite the vastness of the whole. It is important however to approach the work slowly to observe it adequately, one image at a time, in order to slide into the trenches and allow the emotion to permeate the mind.
Text by Lisanne Le Tellier
]]>Forms, Volume and Space
“Throughout their career paths, artists are faced with various challenges and demands. These events allow them to set bases for new research, further develop a subject, experiment with new techniques and thus open themselves to new possibilities. Whatever the creative context may be, symposium, artistic residence or public art contest, artworks have a story and reasons to exist.” Nathalie Racicot, Commissionner, De l’idée au geste exhibition 2018.
In the world of art, a creator is often defined according to his artistic practice in the mind of spectators. However, some creators manifest such versatility of genres and maintain a creative rapport with such a variety of materials that the usual characterizing nomenclatures cannot apply. Sculptor, textile artist, multidisciplinary artist and hybrid practice specialist, Carole Baillargeon is simultaneously all of that and much more.
Carole Baillargeon Photo © Stéphane Bourgeois
Text by Marie-France Bégis
To know more about Carole Baillargeon’s body of work:
vimeo.com/215582959/dbefd23d56
www.lafabriqueculturelle.tv/capsules/6927
www.lafabriqueculturelle.tv/capsules/10002
Ongoing exhibitions:
De l’idée au geste at the Maison Hamel-Bruneau, Sainte-Foy-Sillery borough, Québec, from Septembre 18 to December 16, 2018
Ainsi…/ Thus… at the Centre Culturel Franco-Manitobain, CCFM, Winnipeg, from December 13, 2018 to February 7, 2019
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