Ian Wallace
dal 26/11/2008 al 9/1/2009
Segnalato da
26/11/2008
Ian Wallace
Galerie Greta Meert, Bruxelles
Solo exhibition
Ian Wallace, who was born in 1943, lives and works in Vancouver. He has been a key figure
in the ‘Vancouver School’. His artistic career, which covers numerous exhibitions not only in
Vancouver and the rest of Canada, but also in the US and Europe, has been characterised by
an intimate commitment to teaching. As an art professor at a number of colleges, including
the University of British Columbia and the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, he has had
a crucial influence on a generation of artists that includes Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ken
Lum, and Stan Douglas.
In the late 60s Ian Wallace abandons monochrome painting and concentrates on
photography as a medium through which he can ‘imagine the world as an image of the
world’, and interrelate the ‘purest’ conceptual language with reality.
In the 70s he investigates the relationships between photographic imagery, language,
literature, and the narrative structures of film. His large photographic sequences constitute a
kind of ‘script’ in which the characters – mostly friends of the artist himself – are the
protagonists of a fictional story with multiple meanings.
As a sort of ‘literature of images’ these photo tableaux relate the discursive and symbolic
level with a purely sensible and visual aspect. During this period Ian Wallace is among the
first to see photography as a way of working out conceptualism into a new kind of
pictorialism, with strong roots in historic painting.
When Ian Wallace resumes his monochrome painting in the 80s, he pairs it with
photography into a fresh idiom. By juxtaposing two incompatible paradigms – the referential
approach of documentary photography and the universal reductivism of monochrome
painting – he achieves a kind of hybrid work of art.
Traditionally, photography and painting are considered to offer two kinds of aesthetic
experience to viewers. Ian Wallace’s work complicates this theoretical distinction by joining
them in a formal technique that is close to constructivist photomontage.
The principal themes in Ian Wallace’s work are: city scenes (Street Series), the studio as a
place of production (In the Studio), film (Masculin-Féminin), L’Avventura), and literature
(Tropismes).
An important retrospective of his work is being organised at three major venues: Ian
Wallace, «A Literature of Images » is jointly shown in Witte de With, Rotterdam, in the
Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and in the Kunsthalle, Zürich, up
to and including January 2009.
Galerie Greta Meert hosted solo exhibitions of Ian Wallace in 1989, 1993, and 1999.
Galerie Greta Meert
Vaartstraat 13 rue du Canal B-1000 Brussels Belgium