Season 2008 – 2009
Brigitte Radecki Fractured Landscapes
Vernissage:Thursday, September 11 at 6 pm
Exhibition: September 12 to October 4, 2008
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, September 18 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of abstract paintings by Brigitte Radecki. This series refers to landscape and plays with the magic and ambiguity of human perception.
Fractured Landscapes explores landscape painting as metaphor. Beginning with landscape-like surfaces on the canvas, Radecki then transcribes spontaneous calligraphic lines and forms that originated with paint throws in her preliminary studies. The drippings, gestural lines and scribblings come through negatively from underneath several coats of paint.
The meaning of Radecki’s paintings is not immediately understood but emerges gradually. The viewer becomes an active participant in the perception of the paintings and in their interpretation depending on his or her distance from the work. There is a tension between what seems to be in front and what seems to be in the background, generating a confrontation between the two visions. In this way, the artist brings back the fragility of landscapes that have touched us.
Brigitte Radecki lives and works in Montreal. She received a BFA and a MFA from Concordia University. Her work has been shown across Canada and also in France and Germany. Radecki received several grants from Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Gabor Szilasi Famille
Guest Curator: Hedwidge Asselin
Vernissage and Book Launch: Thursday, October 9 at 6 pm
Exhibition: October 10 to November 1, 2008
Table-ronde: Thursday, October 23 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition and publication of Gabor Szilasi’s family photographs. Szilasi, who has influenced a generation of Canadian photographers, is well known for his documentary photographs and portraiture. Famille presents intimate family images that have not been previously exhibited or published.
Gabor Szilasi’s family photos fall into the same formal and aesthetic categories as his other work. They are not just family snapshots but rather move beyond the personal to document the life of a Montreal family observed over almost a half century. While humour is often evident, it is the sense of love and tenderness which most clearly marks this engaging series of photographs.
Famille marks the occasion of Gabor Szilasi’s 80th birthday. The McClure Gallery is a particularly appropriate venue for the exhibition; it is in the neighbourhood that has been Szilasi’s home for over fifty years. The publication presents 35 reproductions, accompanied with texts by Hedwidge Asselin, art historian and critic, Victoria LeBlanc, McClure Gallery Director, and the artist’s daughter and artist, Andrea Szilasi.
Gabor Szilasi has been living in Montreal, Quebec since 1959. Working as a photographer with the Office du film du Québec, he became familiar with regions of rural Quebec. In 1971 he started teaching photography at the Collège du Vieux Montréal, and from 1980 until his retirement in 1995, at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. He has presented over 30 solo exhibitions and has participated in 60 group exhibitions in Canada and in Europe. Szilasi has received grants from the Canada and Quebec arts councils. A retrospective exhibition of his work with accompanying catalogue will be held at the Musée d’art de Joliette in May 2009.
Collective Vision A Fundraising Exhibition
Gala Evening: Thursday November 6 at 6
Exhibition: November 5 to 15, 2008
Kay Aubanel and Elisabeth Galante A Brush with Nature
Curator: Victoria Leblanc
Vernissage: Thursday, November 27 at 6 pm
Exhibition: November 28 to December 20, 2008
Artists’ Talk and Musical Performance: Friday, December 5 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition featuring the works of Kay Aubanel and Elisabeth Galante. For the last three years, the artists have painted together in the Quebec landscape, producing a large body of work, a part of which will be shown in the gallery.
Each artist approaches the challenges of plein-air painting differently – Galante working in watercolor and gouache and Aubanel in acrylic and oil. Both artists welcome the unexpected and respond to the changing rhythms of nature.
A Brush with Nature highlights the sense of mutual exploration of the land as well as the difference in interpretation of similar sites. Both the exhibition and accompanying text trace the rich process of engagement and mutual influence the artists experienced. The December 5 conference will explore the subject of the exhibition commencing with a musical performance by Denis Lessard on the theme of walking in nature.
Kay Aubanel has taught at the Centre since 1981, as well as given workshops throughout Quebec. She has shown in both solo and group exhibitions since 1975 and has works in many collections including the Canada Council Art Bank. Her work can also be seen at the West End Gallery in Westmount.
Elisabeth Galante studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Indiana University, and Concordia University. She has taught at the Visual Arts Centre since 1987 and has been head of the Department of Fine and Applied Arts since 1990. Her drawings, watercolours and prints have been widely exhibited and she is represented in many private and corporate collections such as the Canada Council Art Bank, Royal Bank of Canada and IBM.
David Elliott Chutes
Vernissage: Thursday, January 8 at 6 pm
Exhibition: January 9 to 31, 2009
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, January 15 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of large format paintings by David Elliott. In this new body of work, developed from small sculptural models, Elliott continues to investigate and push concerns of space and perspective.
Sentimental but spiked with dark humor, his brightly coloured paintings pull together images from a variety of sources to create a playful and personal parallel universe. As he has done for years, Elliott mixes the unfathomable with the banal seeking to ‘visually strike a deal’ between the private arena of the heart and a more raucous public sphere. With dropped shadows and a greater sense of illusion, the new canvases offer a heightened theatricality. The smaller works have the look of reliquaries, the larger ones are like Vaudeville stages, upon which Elliott parades and accumulates his characters.
While Volet I of Chutes is on exhibit at the McClure, Volet II will be shown at the Joyce Yahouda Gallery from January 21 to February 21, 2009. The two galleries have worked together on the publication of a small catalogue to accompany the exhibitions. Texts by James D. Campbell and Eric Simon are included along with twelve colour reproductions of Elliott’s paintings.
Well known as an artist, teacher and writer, David Elliott has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1974. Born in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, he has been living and working in Montreal since 1977. He is an Associate Professor and former Chair of the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University. He has received grants from The Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and also frequently writes about contemporary art.
Robert Walker Mediascapes
Vernissage: Thursday, February 5 at 6 pm
Exhibition: February 6 to 28, 2009
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Robert Walker’s photography. Mediascapes addresses the visual information overload that infects most urban centers. Times Square and Las Vegas represent but two of the epicenters of this phenomenon in what at times appears to be a seamless mediascape of provocative commercial imagery.
Mediascapes represents Walker’s attempt to subvert the original manipulating intention of this imagery by mixing and matching, creating discordant harmonies, often with ironic and humorous results. Times Square can be seen as analogous to a giant Rubric’s Cube, with buses, cabs, and trucks laden with words and images in constant motion. The result is an endless moving collage of cryptic messages.
To achieve maximum dramatic effect in the photographs, Walker employs several compositional devices, such as the exploitation of huge exaggerations of scale. He also creates a sense of ambiguity by confusing the relationship between background and foreground or by manipulating juxtapositions between the real and artificial. Pedestrians, often viewed as victims, seem to be caught in a perpetual trompe l’oeil or separate world. Visual pollution or garden of visual delight? Mediascapes offers an ambivalent view of this contagious new urban reality.
Robert Walker lives and works in Montreal. He spent ten years in New York photographing the city. Portfolios of his work have been published in numerous literary, photography and art magazines including Aperture, American Photographer, Parachute and CV. His work was shown nationally and internationally and is represented in many public and private collections including the Bibliothèque.Nationale de Paris, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Catherine Y. Bates Out of line : Monochromes
Vernissage:Thursday, March 5 at 6 pm
Exhibition: March 6 to 28, 2009
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, March 12 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present Out of Line: Monochromes, a series of monochromatic drawings and paintings by Catherine Y. Bates. While Bates is celebrated for her colour and poetic renditions of specific locales, the works in this exhibition call attention to a more restrained palette that highlights the expressive immediacy of Bates’s drawing and the underlying abstraction that informs her work. The exhibition includes approximately 26 works, ranging in size from large canvases to small, intimate ink drawings. Mostly landscape but not exclusively, all but one of the works have been executed since 2000.
The McClure Galley has joined with Stewart Hall Gallery in Pointe Claire to present a double venue exhibition of Bates’s work. The Stewart Hall exhibition, Out of Line: Retrospective brings together 65 works created over four decades. Bates emerged on the art scene in Montreal at a time of avant garde abstraction and experimentation yet always maintained her connection to the figurative, more particularly to the land and the rich legacy of Canadian landscape painting. The works at Stewart Hall provide a visual means of mapping the conceptual links between abstraction and realism in her work.
The works in Out of Line: Monochromes thus compliment the retrospective by isolating a specific aesthetic trajectory. The works trace the artist’s quest to find a way of ‘drawing into paint’ that would maintain the spontaneity of the drawing process within the painted surface. In many of the larger Georgian Bay works in the exhibition, such as Grasses I and II, meaning derives as much from the artist’s gestural energies embedded in paint as in the realistic images the marks describe. The surface is covered with a rhythmic agitation of lines, as if the artist is pushing her way into the land, establishing a relationship of self to nature. This sense of entry through drawing also marks such evocative works as Owl’s Head, Nostalgia which serves as a dark mourning song for her passionate concern for the environment.
This “in tandem” exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, Out of Line, published by McClure. We would like to thank the artist, Catherine Bates, and Joyce Millar, Director of the Stewart Hall Gallery, for their enthusiastic support and cooperation in all aspects of this project. The Stewart Hall exhibition, Out of Line: Retrospective, takes place March 21 to May 3. The vernissage takes place March 22 at 2 p.m.
Annual Student Show
Vernissage: Saturday, April 4 at 12 pm
Exhibition: April 4 to 23, 2009
Exhibition Press Release:
Students registered in the School of Art’s winter session are invited to exhibit their work in our Annual Student Exhibition. The exhibition, which includes hundreds of works in a wide variety of media, gives students the experience of seeing their work in the context of a professional gallery. It also provides an opportunity for students and public to see the great diversity of creative activity that takes place at the Centre.
Virginia McClure Recent Drawings
Vernissage:Thursday April 30 at 6 pm
Exhibition: April 30 to Mai 23, 2009
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure gallery is pleased to present the exhibition, Recent Drawings, featuring the work of Virginia McClure. While the artist is well-known for her ceramics and monotypes, over the last several years she has returned to figurative drawing. The gallery presents a series of approximately 25 mixed media works on paper.
Many of the works in the exhibition, executed over the last three years, began as studies of the model during the Monday morning drawing sessions McClure enjoys with a group of fellow artists. While done with the traditional media of charcoal or conté, the works are given a unique and layered resonance through the artist’s pre-prepared surfaces whose abstract textures and shapes interact with the figurative portraits. Other studies have been transformed into a series slightly more satirical in nature, which humourously explore feminist viewpoints, often overlaying the initial study with bright acrylic washes.
This exhibition also celebrates the launch of the artist’s third book, The Yellow Painting, published by the Visual Arts Centre. The book, a personal memoir, also recalls the history of the Visual Arts Centre and her own on-going involvement with this institution over more than four decades.
Virginia McClure studied with Arthur Lismer at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as a child. She later graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. McClure has been a pivotal figure in the history of the Centre since the 1950s, serving both as director and president of the board over the years. As an early member of The Potter’s Club, the Centre’s original name, Virginia McClure was a talented and successful ceramic artist. She has gone on to develop as a multimedia artist and, most recently, as a poet. She has exhibited throughout Canada and in the United States as well as in Spain. Her work is in several private collections.
Thérèse Joyce-Gagnon Survol 1979-2009
Curator: Hedwidge Asselin
Vernissage: Thursday May 28 at 6 pm
Exhibition: May 29 to June 20, 2009
Artist’s Talk with Thérèse Joyce-Gagnon and Hedwidge Asselin: Thursday, June 11 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Survol 1979-2009, a mini-retrospective featuring the work of artist painter Thérèse Joyce-Gagnon, well known in Quebec’s artistic milieu. The exhibition is an overview of this artist’s 30 years of work, covering the period from 1979 to 2009.
Joyce-Gagnon’s artistic work is essentially based on series. When in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in the 80s, she discovered the generation X and kept on developing this theme for more than a decade. She found this generation to be aware of ecology and political choices. Their questioning aroused her interest and led her to her present research on ecology. She began this new series with the intention to bring in full light the carelessness, loss of decency and blindness of leaders.
In large format works, she sometimes shows the bareness of the earth where clouds of dust enhance the dryness of the earth. These barren places become spaces for meditation where the bystander freed of guilt is forced to note the evolution of nature.
She still pursues this interest, which now brings her to show the urgency to protect the environment. She fell in love with those “protected areas” (aires protégées), such as lakes, ponds, rivers, marshes, plantations, forests, etc. She denounces the slowness of government action in this regard. The size of her new canvases becomes smaller, more intimate.
Her early 80s series was focused on the theme of intimacy. “Lieux cachés, lieux sacrés” (Hidden Places, Sacred Places) shows the intimacy of a studio. At the beginning of her career, a very long series of abstract paintings titled “Empreintes” (Prints) brought her pure joy and laid the foundations for all her subsequent work. This subsequent work has included paintings inspired by the ecological disaster at Sao Paulo, self portraits painted in solitude, the teenagers’ series and intimate family scenes. Her paintings have always been influenced by her immediate environment.
And throughout her career and through all of the abovementioned series, light remained undoubtedly the main focus of her research.
Thérèse Joyce-Gagnon was born in Montreal where she received her artistic education at l’École des Beaux-Arts and at l’UQAM. Her works have been presented in Canada and in France. Cofounder and President of the Regroupement des artistes en arts visuels du Québec (RAAV) 94-95 and president of the Conseil de la peinture du Québec 91-92, she is very involved in the artistic community. She was received as a member from the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts in 2002 and received bursaries a number of times from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec and from the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work is included in public and private collections.
Privacy Policy | Copyright © 2024 Visual Arts Centre. All rights reserved.
Designed and developed by WSI Digital Marketing Agency Montreal.