Pluralities/Polarities 1950s-1990s: Selections from the McMichael Collection
Reviewing Five Decades of Canadian Art through Our Collection
**** Please Note: This exhibition will be closed from May 8, 2012 and will reopen on July 28, 2012 *****
Complementary to the permanent exhibition Modernity in Canada: The Group of Seven and Their Times, which features highlights from the first half of the twentieth century from the McMichael’s own collection, this exhibition focuses on the latter half of the twentieth century that saw remarkable developments in Canadian artistic expression. Diverging from the national idiom that was the artistic program of the Group of Seven, and inspired by a new age that would be known as (the advent of) contemporary art, Canadian artists across the land produced a national body of work that, much like the country itself, could be described as non-cohesive, occasionally regionalist, mostly congruent with international trends, and sometimes steeped in ideology, theory, and politics. Amongst the diverse styles and attitudes, in general, two major streams of thought appear in the exhibition: the abstractionists (including abstract expressionists and other non-representational artists) and the realists.
In Canada’s largest art centres, new associations such as Painters Eleven in Toronto (formed in 1953) and Les Automatistes in Montreal (formed in the 1940s) were first to introduce abstraction into the Canadian art market. The artists’ commitment to non-representational or non-objective art (even after the dissolution of these two major associations) was not only in keeping with the artistic interests of their influential American and European counterparts, but, in the case of Les Automatistes, was linked to deep-rooted beliefs in artistic and social change.
Abstraction was an infectious avant-garde style that soared to great heights in the middle part of the century and spread across the country, but some artists opted for a different kind of artistic expression in the conventional language of realism. With clear and crisp depiction of subject matter and acute attention to minutiae, they captivated an audience in their evocation of a heightened sense of mood or psychological state of mind.
In their diversity, the artists each contributed to the dynamic and mosaiclike portrait of Canadian art that emerged in this explosive period of national and cultural creativity. Pluralities/Polarities 1950s-1990s: Selections from the Collection, curated by Sharona Adamowicz-Clements, opens on January 21, 2012, and is part of the McMichael’s ongoing interpretation of the permanent collection that includes installing rarely seen works.
Jean Paul Riopelle (1923-2002)
Sur les traces, 1958
oil paint on canvas
65 x 81.3 cm
Gift from Mr. & Mrs. L.L. Odette, Toronto
McMichael Canadian Art Collection
1994.19
