calendario eventi  :: 

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3/2/2010

Three exhibitions

Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal MACM, Montreal

Marcel Dzama
Of Many Turns

Curator Mark Lanctôt

While Vancouver and Toronto may have boasted the most vibrant art scenes in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s, Winnipeg took over in the 2000s, spurred on by artist Marcel Dzama. He quickly carved out an international reputation for his unclassifiable, disconcerting art that reveals a fanciful, anachronistic world. Marcel Dzama – Aux mille tours (Of Many Turns), which offers a critical survey of his haunting yet outrageous work, is the largest solo exhibition of Dzama’s art by a public gallery. It will be presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from February4 to April25, 2010.

The exhibition contains some sixty pieces produced over the last three years, including several new works specially created for this event. It comprises a sketchbook, drawings, collages, dioramas, paintings and films, and examines the artist’s favourite themes: nostalgia, early modernism and the relationship between irony and cynicism, politics and subjectivity.

The title Aux mille tours (Of Many Turns) is taken from the prologue to the Odyssey, where Homer introduces Ulysses as “Polytropos,” a man of many twists and turns. Like Ulysses, Dzama’s art is elusive, prolific and multifaceted. His works draw on a rich repertoire of artistic and literary references, from prewar children’s book illustration and Marcel Duchamp to James Joyce and Dante. He also often refers to childhood experiences in his hometown, Winnipeg: landscape, wildlife, the family farm.

Dzama’s strange works elicit a feeling of ambivalence as, nightmare-like, they present recognizable elements in disturbing, violent or even erotic surroundings. His world has something surrealistic about it, like the famous Goya etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.
You’re sure to be swept away on a most extraordinary odyssey.

The artist
Marcel Dzama was born in Winnipeg in 1974. He began drawing his own comics as a child. He took up painting at high school and enrolled at the University of Manitoba in 1996. With some fellow students, he founded The Royal Art Lodge, a group of artists who meet weekly to create musical performances and collective works, and at the same time pursue solo careers. While he was still at university, Dzama caught the eye of the Richard Heller Gallery, in Santa Monica, California, with an exhibition at the Fate Gallery in Winnipeg. In 2000, Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art organized a one-man show of Dzama’s works, called More Famous Drawings, that travelled across Canada, with a stop at the Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montréal. Dzama was featured here again as part of the CIAC Biennale in 2002.

Marcel Dzama has had a number of prestigious exhibitions around the world. His works can be found in the collections of such major museums as MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the Tate Modern in London. The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal is especially proud of its acquisition last year of a spectacular work by the artist: a fresco of 300 ceramic sculptures titled On the Banks of the Red River, 2008, and shown here for the first time. Dzama has lived and worked in New York since 2004. He is represented by the David Zwirner Gallery, New York.

Organization and tour
The exhibition was organized by Mark Lanctôt, curator at the Musée. A tour is planned by the MAC to begin in December 2010, following the show’s Montréal presentation.

Catalogue
Marcel Dzama – Aux mille tours (Of Many Turns) is accompanied by a bilingual, 116-page catalogue. The publication contains an essay by Musée and exhibition curator Mark Lanctôt, a list of works, a biobibliography and numerous colour reproductions. It may be purchased for $29.95 at the museum’s Boutique or from your local bookseller.

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Etienne Zack

Curator: François LeTourneux

In Etienne Zack’s innovative and vibrant paintings, the viewer’s eye is led every which way over the canvas. Like a modern-day maze, each of his works draws us into a multilayered labyrinth. The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal presents the exhibition Etienne Zack from February 4 to April 25, 2010.

The exhibition
Etienne Zack was previously featured in The Québec Triennial. Now the Musée has mounted a solo exhibition comprising twenty-two paintings produced over the last six years, including two major new works Formalities and Proceeding to Irrevocability, 2009 created specifically for the show. This is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition.

Zack is one of today’s artists who are truly pushing the envelope in terms of painting concept. His work focuses on the context in which artworks are produced and exhibited, and the physical and conceptual tools that go into creating them: the studio, art gallery, painter’s materials, and historical and theoretical reference works. Architectural objects and motifs merrily accumulate and intersect in rhythmical compositions with multiple vanishing points. The works reveal a process of deconstruction, fragmentation, multiplication and mise en abyme in a rigorously ordered reconstruction.

Both poetic and playful, Zack’s painting prompts us to re-examine the everyday world around us.

The artist
Born in Montréal in 1976, Etienne Zack attended Concordia University before moving on to Vancouver, where he studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art Design. In addition to The Québec Triennial in 2008, his recent exhibitions include East International at the Norwich Gallery in Britain in 2004, Paint at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2006-2007 and According to This at the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway in 2006. He won the 2005 RBC Canadian Painting Competition and was awarded the Prix Pierre-Ayot in 2008. Zack lives and works in Montréal, and is represented by the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver and Art 45 in Montréal.

Organization and catalogue
The exhibition was organized by François LeTourneux, Associate Curator at the Musée. It is accompanied by a bilingual, 88-page catalogue. The publication contains essays by François LeTourneux and Séamus Kealy, Director/Curator of the Model Art and Niland Gallery, Sligo, Ireland, a list of works, a biobibliography and numerous colour reproductions. The Musée wishes to thank the RBC Foundation and Equinox Gallery for the support they provided, as well as the City of Montréal and the Association des galeries d’art contemporain (AGAC), in conjunction with the 2008 Prix Pierre-Ayot. The catalogue may be purchased for $29.95 at the museum’s Boutique or from your local bookseller.

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Luanne Martineau

Curator: Lesley Johnstone

Saskatoon-born artist Luanne Martineau has made a name for herself with her virtually indescribable hybrid felt and wool sculptures. Human, animal and organic, all at once, they produce an experience that wavers between fascination and repulsion, the microscopic and the macroscopic. The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal presents the exhibition Luanne Martineau from February 4 to April 25, 2010.

Form Fantasy, 2009, for example, made of industrial felt, needle-felted wool and thread, looks like a soft industrial chair set on a museum base, with a grotesque figure sitting on top of it. The body recalls one of Barnett Newman’s zips, and the head, a Duchamp-style wheel, with a hole in the middle like a Cyclops’ eye.

Martineau has been challenging the underpinnings of American avant-garde art since the 1950s, in works that abound in references to Abstract Expressionism, Postminimalism, feminism and popular culture. As she breaks down the boundaries between figurative and abstract, art and craft, Martineau skilfully creates a tension between her unsettling subjects and her use of soft, pastel-coloured craft materials. The results are definitely disconcerting. Get ready for works that tackle issues dealing with the aesthetic, the social and the psychological, and do it with a light, humorous touch.

The exhibition
The exhibition will give visitors a chance to explore Martineau’s astonishing world through a dozen recent works produced between 2004 and 2009: an artist’s book, drawings, sculptures and what she calls “drulptures,” a unique combination of the latter two art forms.

The artist
Luanne Martineau lives and works in Victoria, British Columbia, where she teaches art theory and drawing at the University of Victoria. Born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1970, she studied at the Alberta College of Art & Design and the University of British Columbia. She was short-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2009 and her works are to be found in a number of collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, which owns three of the pieces shown in the exhibition: the sculpture The Body, 2006, and the artist’s book Freakout (Temporal Bodies) and the drawing Untitled, both from 2007. Martineau is represented by Jessica Bradley Art Projects, in Toronto, and TrépanierBaer, in Calgary.

Organization and tour
The exhibition was organized by Lesley Johnstone, curator at the Musée. It will be presented in 2011 at the Rodman Hall Arts Centre, Brock University, in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Catalogue
The show is accompanied by a bilingual, 56-page catalogue. The publication contains essays by Musée curator Lesley Johnstone, Dan Adler, Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Visual Arts, York University, Toronto, and Shirley Madill, Director of the Rodman Hall Arts Centre, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, a list of works, a biobibliography and numerous colour reproductions. It was produced with contributions from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, TrépanierBaer, Jessica Bradley Art Projects and the Rodman Hall Arts Centre, Brock University. The catalogue may be purchased for $24.95 at the museum’s Boutique or from your local bookseller.

Art workshop
An art workshop in connection with Luanne Martineau’s Untitled, 2007, will be held every Sunday afternoon from March 14 to April 18. For all, with family or friends, at 2p.m. or 3p.m. Called A New Twist on Drawing, the workshop will immerse participants in Martineau’s phantasmagorical world.

Image: Luanne Martineau, Form Fantasy, 2009. Industrial felt, needle-felted wool and thread 243.8 x 66 x 71.1 cm, Collection of the artist. Courtesy TrépanierBaer Gallery, Calgary. Photo: John Dean

The Musée d'art contemporain is a provincially owned corporation funded by the Ministère de la Culture, des Communications et de la Condition féminine du Québec. It receives additional funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Media Relations Officer, Danielle Legentil Phone (514) 847-6232, e-mail at: danielle.legentil@macm.org

Meet the artists and curators
On Thursday, February 4 at 4 p.m., the public is invited to share in a discussion between curators Lesley Johnstone, Mark Lanctôt and François LeTourneux, and artists Marcel Dzama, Luanne Martineau and Etienne Zack, about common threads that run through their respective bodies of work. The meeting will take place in English, with a bilingual question period to follow. Length: 90 minutes. In the Atrium. Free admission.

Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal
185, Sainte-Catherine Ouest Montréal, Québec H2X 3X5
Open Tuesday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Friday Nocturnes: on the first Friday of every month from 5 to 9 p.m.
Admission:
$8 adults
$6 seniors (aged 60 and over)
$4 students (aged 30 and under with student I.D.)
$16 family package (maximum 4 persons including at least 1 adult with adolescents aged 12 to 17).
Free admission for children under 12 and members of the Musée.
Free admission every Wednesday evening from 5 to 9 p.m.

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