Clint Roenisch

9 June 2010 — 10 July 2010

Jack Burman

Clint Roenisch is pleased to present a selection of recent photographs by Jack Burman. This is the third exhibition with the gallery and is timed to coincide with the launch of a substantial monograph published by The Magenta Foundation.

The Magenta Foundation has written:

For over thirty years, Canadian photographer Jack Burman has followed his obsession with the dead from Palermo to Germany, from Bolivia to Argentina, documenting and amassing a macabre yet strangely beautiful collection of photographs of prepared anatomical specimens. Burman, a scholar of American literature under the tutelage of the renowned Caesar Blake at the University of Toronto in the 1970s, discovered photography in his mid-twenties. He began by spending two months of every year in the American southwest, teaching himself about light and film in the desert and learning about processing back in Toronto, while continuing to immerse himself in the works of Faulkner, Melville and Dickinson. It wasn’t until Burman found a used copy of a book of Peter Hujar’s photography, with ten photos from Sicily’s catacombs, that his life-long obsession began. He first travelled to the catacombs of Sicily and Palermo, then to Germany and South America, seeking out the works of some of the world’s finest anatomists and their most artistic preparations of the human body. Using only minimal light, no flash and five-minute exposure, Burman creates what has been described as “painterly” portraits of the dead. He began with a Hasselblad and now works with a 4 × 5 and an 8 × 10 camera, and uses the lab of Ed Burtynsky for the oversized, intimate detail of the prints. The Dead also includes a single photo of the gas chamber of the Majdanek death camp in Poland, which Burman describes as more monstrous than any of the other photographs in the collection, since there are no bodies, only the brilliant Prussian blue of the walls of the chambers, from the oxidization of the Zylon-B gas, left to document the atrocities.

The 52 photographs of The Dead, combined with an intimate portrait of their creator through an in-depth interview conducted by Robert Enright, is exquisitely presented in full-colour on card stock and with embossed, linen boards. The book is available only in a limited edition of 500. 100 of these come in a hand-crafted wooden case with a signed print by Burman.

The National Post has compared Burman’s images of anatomy specimens to a “...Chardin still-life, each body part silhouetted against a black backdrop and soaked in a velvety, atmospheric light…”.

Related press: Jack Burman: Book Of The Dead, Facing Death, Again and Again, Secrets Of The Dead (CBC), Jack Burman’s The Dead, Press Release

23 April 2010 — 29 May 2010

Marcel van Eeden

For his vast archive of drawings that he began in 1992 and has continued on a daily basis ever since Marcel van Eeden has attracted significant international attention. Born in 1965 in The Hague the artist has chosen to concentrate exclusively on the period before his birth for his source material, culling images and text fragments from old photographs, magazines, newspapers, art history and film stills and then recreating them in graphite and occasionally coloured pencil. From within this conceptual framework van Eeden animates a time he did not know while also removing his own biography from his production in the process. Thus the drawings can be seen as a kind of anti-legacy in which the artist’s absence is all the more apparent. In fact the entire cycle of drawings has been referred to in the past as “The Encyclopedia Of My Death”. In 2004 van Eeden began linking individual drawings into groups with distinct narratives. One such series, “K.M. Wiegand: Life and Work”, presented at the 4th Berlin Biennial in 2006, comprised 150 drawings in which an impossible, fictitious biography was crafted for a real, historical (and presumably mild-mannered) botanist. This was followed by the series “Celia” (shown at the Kunstverein Hannover) about Celia Copplestone and, in 2007, both “The Archeologist: The Travels of Oswald Sollmann” (shown at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Caja de Burgos, Spain) and “The Death of Matheus Boryna” (shown at the Kunstverein Heidelberg). In each of these the viewer encounters fictional protagonists, inspired by historical figures, whose motives and relationship to others is complex, fragmentary and shifting. K.M. Wiegand, Celia Copplestone, Oswald Sollmann and Matheus Boryna all intersected in the 2008 series “The Zurich Trial, Part 1: Witness For The Prosecution” (shown at the Kunsthalle Hamburg). Then in 2009 van Eeden created “Sammlung Boryna” especially for a solo booth at Art Basel where the focus of the series was the protagonist’s role as an art collector. In early 2010, in Zurich, van Eeden presented “A Cutlet Vaudeville Show” in which, as Judith Welter writes, “the three main characters, dressed as cutlets and in various roles, appear together on stage in several, sequential humorist presentations. In the context of the entire cycle, the harmless showplace and the ironic plot obscure the possibly dubious intrigues incited by the characters’ multiple identities.” For Marcel van Eeden’s exhibition in Canada he has drawn a new cycle of forty drawings that weave a blood-stained, violent narrative set among cabins on a lake…

Related press: Globe and Mail - May 2010, Murder Most Marvelous: Marcel van Eeden at Clint Roenisch, Press Release

12 March 2010 — 17 April 2010

Dorian Fitzgerald

The first solo exhibition by the Toronto artist. Three new, large paintings and a colour photograph. The subject matter of the paintings range from a monumental Cartier bracelet and a Fabergé Egg ornamented by a rose trellis, to the largest work, at nine by nine feet, entitled “Sir Elton John’s Sunglasses, Woodside Estate, Old Windsor, England”. The photograph is an image that has been freely appropriated from the Hubble Telescope and depicts a particular star-birthing region known as “The Eta Carinae Nebula, NGC 3372”.  This sublime event is shown in distinct, celestial contrast to the man-made, material indulgences depicted in the paintings. Each of the paintings has been made using acrylic paint and caulking in a slow, precise method that FitzGerald has refined in his studio over several years, although the total number of paintings made in this manner is less than fifteen given their scale and complexity. The process involves researching suitable imagery, manipulating it with software, making a large-scale acetate transfer onto canvas and then using clear caulking to delineate areas of pure colour so that the image is built up slowly in a manner that resembles a kind of pointillism filtered into vector graphics. FitzGerald’s largest painting to date, “The Hacker-Pschorr Beerhall, Oktoberfest, Munich” (2005), at twelve feet wide by eighteen feet high, took the artist more than three years to complete. Other subjects include “The Throne Room, Queluz National Palace, Lisbon” (2009) and “Table Decorations, Oprah Winfrey Party for Sidney Poitier” (2006), both now in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Another large painting, “The Dining Room of The Regina d’Italia (Stefano Gabbana’s Yacht)” (2008), was shown for the first time in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art later that same year and generated significant interest.

Of his work and his process, the artist has written that “the images that interest me are symmetrically organized, complex masses of objects that assume fractal-like forms. These opulent interiors and luxury objects not only benefit from the rich texture and application of paint, they also closely align with my socio-political interests. I see myself as a contemporary court painter, documenting on a grand scale the material and spatial excesses of our time.”

Related press: Dorian FitzGerald at Clint Roenisch, Toronto Star (Dorian FitzGerald), Dorian FitzGerald’s Deluxe Transformations, Press Release

4 March 2010 — 7 March 2010

Hugh Scott Douglas

A three-day-only exhibition of lamps, monoprint paintings, ceramic sculpture and potato-stamp paintings by Hugh Scott Douglas, a promising 4th year thesis student at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Of the exhibition, the artist has written:

“It’s a musty smell. A feeling something like that word squish. I was caught in the rain earlier, my socks where soaked through, but I don’t have much to do later so I have no real reason to complain. It’s just a little uncomfortable thats all. I’ll change them and get back to my book, then maybe call up an old friend and see if he’s free for a few rounds of tic-tac-toe. Maybe sit on my hands, maybe for an hour, until maybe there is nothing but pins and needles. Close my eyes and hope for the best, or not. Could this be a new and better way to have it all? Maybe.

Tired of the studio so I head back outside and sit on a bench. Sit on a curb. Sigh, then try and hum along to your favourite song. I should try and figure out a way to have more spare time or less spare time or work more or work less or work more at working less or wo—(past here there was nothing but a large brown stain with swirls of blue ink that reminded the reader of alabaster)—”

Related press: N/A

14 January 2010 — 27 February 2010

Jason de Haan

Functioning, as de Haan says, “within and between the poetic, conceptual and absurd”, Like Dust brings together nine new works on paper, four sculptural works and an editioned set of photographs. These works, made of crystals, salt, marble, wood, metal, foil, “speculatively haunted” mirrors and brick, collectively suggest, often through slight gestures, various situations relating to time and material. Among other possibilities the exhibition proposes gazing into the grave plot directly above that of Marilyn Monroe’s; the containment of the Northern Lights; an energy generator composed of several dozen small selenite obelisks; and activity in outer space. Also notable is a new large work from the Salt Beard series which de Haan has previously built in Mexico and Iceland. These are mineral growths that are deposited onto the busts of various figures, based partly on the story of Rip van Winkle — the fictitious man who fell asleep under a tree for a number of years and awoke to an unfamiliar world. The Salt Beards aim to re-animate material, persona and style, allowing the sculpture to exist again as new while looking both forward and backward through time. The title, Like Dust, is therefore relative in one form or another to each individual work in the show, alluding to what, where and when we are, relative to the natural, the historical, the yet-to-happen and even to metaphysical realities.

Related press: Canadian Art - JDH at Clint Roenisch, Globe and Mail, Press Release

25 November 2009 — 18 December 2009

Jeremy Jansen
Richard Serra
Niall McClelland
Ellsworth Kelly
Chris Cran

An exhibition pairing the young Toronto artists Jeremy Jansen (b.1979) and Niall McClelland (b.1980) with two works by the senior Americans Richard Serra (b.1939) and Ellsworth Kelly (b.1923). The exhibition, almost entirely black or grey, will contain photographs, folded drawings, large photocopies, bedsheet “skins”, sprayed stencils on paper, silkscreens, a newsprint work and a sculpture.

Jeremy Jansen is known in Toronto primarily for his black and white photographs of bands, landscapes and urban situations. Recurring motifs of pattern, opacity, diffusion, gloaming and chiaroscuro pervade much of his imagery. Also to be shown for the first time is a new sculpture of wood, staples and organic matter that has been meticulously built up and aged over the past several months to resemble an old fragment of a “gig pole;” the much-used telephone pole used downtown for announcing shows and cultural events. Niall McClelland’s work, meanwhile, radiates aspects of texture, process, geometry, formal elegance and hinted-at rituals (particularly in the “bedsheet skins”, which resemble batik but are made with a more restrained, black and grey palette than the usual full-spectrum excesses. Richard Serra is a titan of sculpture whose works have been shown continuously around the world for decades. His analogous works on paper project a similar heft and balance to his trademark steel sculptures. Ellsworth Kelly is widely known for his work with colour and shape. When Kelly’s geometric abstractions were first exhibited in 1959, they were already perceived as having “hard, crisp edges (that) commanded the eye to feel them as the hand would feel soft flesh” (E.C Goosen, Sixteen Americans - Moma).

Related press: Toronto Star (PDF), Toronto Star,

4 November 2009 — 21 November 2009

Chris Cran
Martin Bennett
Artist Unknown
Marcel van Eeden
Matthew Brown

A pause in the proceedings, after a hectic October, before the start of Black To Back And Light. A suite of five drawings by Marcel van Eeden; a ink drawing by Chris Cran of a framing device; a painting by Matthew Brown that appears wholly intuitive but which has digitized, predetermined beginnings; a painting by Martin Bennett of a heron standing on one leg, nested inside a geometric pattern; and a massive crate bound for Nassau that could temporarily not be hidden elsewhere….

Related press: N/A

22 October 2009 — 26 October 2009

Dorian FitzGerald
Jason de Haan
T&T (Tony Romano and Tyler Brett)
Matthew Brown

The booth is dominated by a new, monumental painting, “The Throne Room, Queluz National Palace, Lisbon” which serves to introduce the artist, Dorian FitzGerald (*1975, Toronto).

Related press: N/A

17 September 2009 — 26 October 2009

Harold Klunder

Four new works, each nine and a half feet high by six and a half feet wide. In July of 2008 Klunder was commissioned to make two large paintings for a private collection in the Bahamas. He soon warmed to both the idea and the specific scale and began instead on four works in his studio in Flesherton, Ontario. He finished in August of 2009.

Harold Klunder is one of Canada’s leading painters. He has exhibited constantly for more than three decades since his first solo show at Sable-Castelli Gallery in 1976. This is his third exhibition at Clint Roenisch. Born in The Netherlands in 1943 Harold Klunder emigrated to Canada in 1952. He grew up in Hamilton, Ontario and presently works in Montreal and Flesherton. His paintings are held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, MuseumLondon and the Winnipeg Art Gallery among many others.

Related press: Globe and Mail, Press Release

3 September 2009 — 12 September 2009

Marcel van Eeden
Jack Burman
Louise Bourgeois
Kent Dorn
Sylvain Bouthillette
Chris Cran

A short group show including Louise Bourgeois.

Related press: N/A

17 June 2009 — 11 July 2009

Matthew Brown
Roger Ballen
Jack Burman
Martin Bennett
Kent Dorn
Harold Klunder
Massimo Guerrera

A summer group show curated by Ralph Waldo Emerson…

Related press: N/A

18 April 2009 — 30 May 2009

Chris Cran

Regarded as one of Canada’s most important painters (Canadian Art, winter 2005) Chris Cran has for more than two decades consistently reinvented his work, always questioned the optical mechanics of perception and thoroughly examined the urge to apprehend space and form in art. His many series have all been widely exhibited, reviewed and collected, from the Self-Portraits (1980s) that established Cran’s name in Canada to the subsequent Stripes, Half-Tone, Clear and Screen paintings through the 90s to the Abstracts and more recent Sublime Sales Series. Nancy Tousley has written that “Cran’s analysis of the rhetoric of painting is as clear-eyed as it is unsentimental about painting’s present condition. At the same time, he reaffirms revelation, beauty and new ways of seeing as jobs that painting can still do. Painting itself might be a commodity but in Cran’s work perception and beauty are non-consumable and fluid.”

Related press: New York Times, Calgary Herald, Murray Whyte, Terence Dick, Globe and Mail, Press Release

17 March 2009 — 11 April 2009

Brett Lund
Roger Ballen
Chris Cran
Massimo Guerrera
Harold Klunder
Photographer Unknown

A group show!

Related press: Toronto Star,

29 January 2009 — 7 March 2009

Matthew Brown

These works are based on initial drawings that are run through a series of automated functions in image-processing software where they get reconfigured into junk graphics, fractal shapes and skewed optical sequences. This imagery is then painted onto canvas through an imaginative filter rather than mimed exactly. Lee Henderson has written that “the organizing principle behind Brown’s work is not familiar but the imagery somehow is. Like looking at your mother’s sister.” The paintings suggest a proto-portrait or object-portrait of vaguely familiar, highly suggestive forms. Here humanoid and anthropomorphic shapes interact with each other through cryptic, evocative gestures. Others seem to stand totemically alone, singular and central against acidic backgrounds, resistant to narrative scrutiny. Sean Alward has written that “it is exceedingly difficult to make oil paint look unfamiliar after more than 500 years of continuous use, but Brown achieves this to some degree through an explicitly digital sensibility.

Related press: Globe and Mail, Press Release

21 November 2008 — 21 December 2008

Heather & Ivan Morison

“The current show is too interesting to miss. For it Wales artists Heather & Ivan Morison present a show that includes a tree like sculpture made out of mud from Roenisch’s basement; a hole in the hardwood floor so one can see artist-dug pit in said basement; a wood-burning stove in full operation; prints of isolationist-feeling desert RV’s with a threatening golden rock floating in the sky; a large mylar kite reminiscent of both Edison Alexander Graham Bell and Buckminster Fuller, and a film in the basement that riffs on that Desert RV/floating fool’s gold theme with psychedelic guitar. It’s ascetic and it’s good.”
- Leah Sandals, 2008

Related press: Frieze Magazine, Terence Dick, Color Magazine, Press Release

30 October 2008 — 15 November 2008

Sylvain Bouthillette

New text paintings by the Montreal artist: Laissez Tomber La Tete Dans Le Coeur Le Coueur Dans Le Ventre Et Remontez Le Ventre Dans Le Coeur. Ostie D’fuck D’ostie D’fukin Fuck. C’est Assez. Crisse De Fuck De Fuckin Crisse. Tabarnaque De Crisse D’ostie De Fuck De Calice.

Related press: N/A

2 October 2008 — 6 October 2008

Harold Klunder

In a stand-alone booth beside the special projects of the AGO, MOCCA and the AGYU, Clint Roenisch will present a massive, early Harold Klunder triptych, “Future, Present, Past (Self-Portrait II)” at the Toronto International Art Fair. This rare painting, eight by twenty feet, was included in a solo show in New York at the 49th Parallel in 1990 and in the 1999 Klunder survey at MuseumLondon, curated by Ted Fraser. His catalogue essay relates Klunder’s work to that of Gorky, Kandinsky and Chaim Soutine, to Klunder’s Dutch predecessors Jacob Ruisdael and Mondrian, and to the operatic tableaux of Anselm Kiefer among others.

Roald Nasgaard also wrote of this painting in his book, Abstract Painting In Canada:

“...but over the 1980s [the paintings] developed into large and ambitious programmatic schemas with titles like ‘Future, Present, Past (Self-Portrait II), 1985 -1987’, replete with extended processions of symbolic images: human viscera, or primal forms drawn out of the unconscious or dreams, or echoes from the history of art..”

Related press: N/A

17 September 2008 — 25 October 2008

T&T (Tony Romano and Tyler Brett)

Over the last ten years Tony Romano and Tyler Brett have collaborated as T&T on images, models and sound works. Their melded vision is based on advanced engineering, ingenious upcycling, retrofitted architecture, sound ecological principles, rejigged technology and social harmony. They combine a sophisticated but survivalist mode of living with building strategies rooted in modernism and practices like the Coop Himmelb(l)au in particular. With futurist scenes of zero-footprint settlements, de-mobilized cars, wind turbines, water wheels, solar panels, filtration systems, bio-domes and green structures, T&T seem to propose a post-apocalyptic situation that is both optimistic and pragmatically grounded. Far from being dark and violent, T&T have populated their futurist realities with hobo/troubadour collectives who roam the horizon, build sustainable habitats, perform music and deliver oral histories.

Related press: Canadian Art - Tony Romano and Tyler Brett: Carchitecture, and Cautionary Ingenuity,

2 August 2008 — 30 August 2008

Gabor Szilasi
Martin Bennett
Unknown
Chris Cran
Guido Molinari

asphalt, summer, wind, goldenrod…

Related press: N/A

17 May 2008 — 28 June 2008

Martin Bennett
Roger Ballen
Artist Unknown
Jorg Herold
Sylvain Bouthillette
Chris Cran
Romas Astrauskas
Massimo Guerrera
James Nicholas

His hand gestures reminded me of The Burghers Of Calais…

Related press: N/A

10 May 2008 — 11 May 2008

Deloro

A gig by the Toronto band.

Deloro:
Jennifer Castle
Paul Mortimer
David Clarke
Tony Romano
Dallas Wehrle
David Armstrong-Six

Doors at 8
Band at 9
65 people max

Related press: N/A

24 April 2008 — 28 April 2008

Marcel van Eeden

Booth #7-2111
NEXT Art Fair
Chicago

Join us in Chicago for the NEXT Fair where we will present a solo show of drawings by Marcel van Eeden (b.1965, The Hague).

Marcel van Eeden has garnered international recognition for his drawings. They have been shown at Art Basel Miami with Galerie Zink, the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, the Kunsthalle Tubingen and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 2007 alone. Exhibitions in Rome, Paris and London are scheduled for 2008.

Related press: N/A

12 March 2008 — 19 April 2008

Guido Molinari
Chris Cran
Martin Bennett
Christian Eckart

with thanks to plants and animals

Related press: N/A

24 January 2008 — 29 February 2008

Kent Dorn

Clint Roenisch is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by the American artist Kent Dorn (b. 1979). This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery following his successful Canadian debut in 2006.

There is a rather elegiac elegance to the eight paintings that comprise Monument. In naming the show thus Dorn has said that he is interested in “things built in the name of death and remembrance.” His imagery is therefore shot through with a sense of mortality, transience and decline, all of it made more explicit by its means of execution. Unlike many painters who work thickly Dorn has studiously avoided the expressionist mark-making that propels this impulse. Instead he works slowly over a period of four to six weeks – for each small, easel-sized painting – constructing his images using dried-up and cast-off clumps of oil paint, laying them against and over each other on the surface, tentatively arranging and rearranging each as the image begins to take shape. These clumps are then stuck in place with coloured pins. Besides forming a distinct visual field of their own the pins puncture the skin of the canvas and bring a sense of precariousness to the whole endevour. The built-up areas, some as much as two inches thick, seem to make the canvas sag under the weight of such heightened materiality.

And then there are the images. Model shows a preening bodybuilder much in the manner of Richard Hamilton’s famous collage. In both the male appears to be at the peak of physical form but the muscles and flesh of Dorn’s figure look ravaged and tenuous. His facial expression too is more informed by Francis Bacon than Hamilton’s confident, all-American specimen. Garden meanwhile shows a suburban yard and the side of a neighbour’s house, normally a scene of domestic serenity and order. But here a window appears to have been boarded up and tagged by graffiti while the garden itself is rendered in a squeamish, gone-off palette. With Sundown a set of bunk beds support two prostrate, corpse-like figures rendered in black, clumpy paint. Their quilts, each modeled in turgid, inch thick oil, convey the feeling of being subsumed more than one of enveloping comfort. Adding to the funereal atmosphere are the drawn blinds and a generic reproduction of a sunset tacked to the wall. Lover’s Leap shows the abyss of the fabled star-crossed couple, here seen as a torn image of porn stars on a billboard on the edge of a waterfall. Here the ill-fated, the suicidal, the not-to-be are compelled to throw themselves over. A tattered phrase beside the couple urges them not to lose hope. “God Listens…” it says. “…TO SLAYER!” the graffiti adds mockingly. In the second gallery is Attic with its forlorn, unmade bed and memento mori; Monument which shows an abused-looking rock and more graffiti; Nightstand with dead and moldy-looking flowers, a ticking metronome and Sartre’s “Nausea.” The last painting is Camus who is portrayed only by his tombstone and some turned-over soil.

Kent Dorn has an M.F.A from the University of Houston (2005). One of his mentors through the program was the acclaimed Canadian artist Christian Eckart, whom the gallery also represents. Both live and work in Houston.

Related press: The Globe and Mail - Kent Dorn,

12 January 2008 — 19 January 2008

Chris Cran
Herbert Siebner
Massimo Guerrera

The exhibition will run for seven days and feature six works by three artists. Total visitors to the island are estimated at one hundred, staggered over seven days, as befits its exclusivity. Most will happily spend less than a minute basking in the radiance of each work, as befits our distracted times. Each work, in turn, seems to reside elsewhere or give the impression of being other than what it is.

Related press: N/A

8 November 2007 — 22 December 2007

Martin Bennett

“Honoured godfather,

With those words I begin the journal I engaged myself to keep for you-no words could be more suitable! Very well then. The place: on board the ship at last. The year: you know it. The date? Surely what matters is that it is the first day of my passage to the other side of the world; in token whereof I have this moment inscribed the number “one” at the top of this page. For what I am about to write must be a record of our first day. The month or day of the week can signify little since in our long passage from the south of Old England to the Antipodes we shall pass through the geometry of all four seasons.”

- William Golding, opening to Rites of Passage, 1980

Martin Bennett was born in Winchester, England in 1970 and immigrated to Canada in 1975. He is known here for his Static Image paintings that examine the regions of abstraction, photography, figuration and the mechanical reproduction while being none of these at once. These works, based on his own photographs and then painted in oil in patterns and grids of colour, employ a system that constructs the image while simultaneously obscuring its reading behind a veil of optical effects. In the final process Bennett meticulously sands down the oil paint to such a degree that the weave of the canvas begins to show through, creating a third vivid field of visual reference. In this way much of the inherent tactility and lusciousness of oil paint is suspended in favour of a slow, simmering and elusive method of presenting the image. To arrive at this method of working Bennett looked to the multivalent cues and visual strategies found in the works of Boetti, Magritte, Canaletto and others. For this exhibition Bennett further refined this system to include ‘folding volumes’ where geometric, diagonal planes of colour are nested within scenes from Rome, London and Canada.

Related press: N/A Press Release

26 October 2007 — 29 October 2007

Sylvain Bouthillette
Martin Bennett
Chris Cran
Jack Burman
Seth Scriver
Marcel van Eeden

The Toronto Art Fair

Related press: N/A

11 October 2007 — 14 October 2007

With works by:
Marcel van Eeden
Martin Bennett
Kent Dorn
Roger Ballen
Sylvain Bouthillette

Related press: N/A

14 September 2007 — 27 October 2007

Marcel van Eeden

Born in 1965 Marcel van Eeden’s magnum opus is to make a drawing a day based on sources that precede the year of his birth. Using imagery culled from an array of historical material - illustrations from old books, topographical atlases, films, art history, newspaper clippings, photo archives, magazines such as Life, Paris Match and others - van Eeden has set himself the task of drawing a vast visual diary of a world he never knew. He begins a new drawing by starting in the top left corner and ending at the bottom right. In between emerges a bewildering range of images: explosions, trains, streetscapes, abstractions, accidents, sex acts, divers, diagrams, botanical specimens, on and on. That none of the imagery reflects the era of their maker suggests that his legacy will be a project that immortalizes his absence as much as it did his presence. In selecting more than one hundred of these drawings to be included in the 4th Berlin Biennale (2006) one of the curators, Massimilano Gioni, wrote that van Eeden’s “visual universe in fact seems affected by a radical form of iconophilia, an unstoppable urge to consume images and at the same time, by doing so, save them from oblivion.”  Van Eeden’s project has been compared to the conceptual strategies of On Kawara and to the vast compendium of images compiled in Gerhard Richter’s Atlas.

Marcel van Eeden’s drawings have been widely exhibited. In 2007 alone exhibitions have been mounted at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, the Kunsthalle Tübingen, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Bonniers Konsthall Stockholm and at Draíoch in Dublin. Solo shows are planned for 2008 in Paris, Rome and Los Angeles. His work can be found in prominent public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art New York, Magasin 3 Stockholm, the Sammlung Goetz Collection and the Burger Collection.

Related press: N/A

29 June 2007 — 28 July 2007

Alighiero e Boetti
Martin Bennett

Martin Bennett was born in Winchester, England in 1970 and immigrated to Canada in 1975. A graduate of the Alberta College of Art he now divides his time between Canada and Rome. Boetti, meanwhile, was born in Turin in 1940 and moved to Rome in 1972 where he died in 1994. The exhibition proposes a link between the underlying structural strategies of both artist’s work.

Martin Bennett is known in Canada for his Static Image paintings that examine the regions of abstraction, photography, figuration and the reproduction while being none of these at once. These works, painted in patterns and grids of colour since 2000, are based on the employment of a system that constructs the image while simultaneously obscuring its reading behind a veil of optical effects. To arrive at this method of working Bennett looked to the multivalent cues found in the works not just of Boetti but also Magritte, Canaletto and others. From a physical perspective Bennett built upon the sanding techniques used in an earlier series called Grey Volume Paintings. These luminous grey monochromes project a painted ‘atmosphere’ that has a grid as its starting point but which is then muted by a uniform, hand-sanding of the surface. In this way the weave of the canvas also begins to show through the dark fields of oil paint. The effect produces an elusive array of visual references. For this exhibition a large pristine Grey Volume from 1996 will be shown beside four smaller, new works.

In 1973 Alighiero Boetti renamed himself as a dual persona Alighiero e Boetti (“Alighiero and Boetti”) reflecting the opposing factors presented in his work: the individual and society, error and perfection, order and disorder. Like Martin Bennett, Boetti also took a keen interest in various systems of classification (grids, maps, etc.). As a conceptual artist Boetti produced a great variety of artworks, often following very precise rules and even high principles such as the 1971 Nobel Prize-winning Jacques Monod’s “Chance and Necessity”. Boetti produced ballpoint pen Monochromes (blue, black, red, green) with a white coded writing coming out of the evenly doodled coloured surface. In the early 1970s he made systematic ‘exercises’ with pencil on squared paper based on musical and mathematical rhythms. Boetti’s elaborate tapestries, embroidered by hand in Afghanistan, used grid structured, multi-coloured “Magic Squares” of texts that stemmed from cultural, philosophical, mathematical and linguistic contexts. His “Tutto” (Everything) works presented dense puzzles where indeed everything can be found (newspaper silhouettes, figures of animals and shapes of domestic objects …). For this exhibition a well-known Boetti work, Da Uno A Dieci, will be shown for its relationship to Bennett’s own practice of painting. This work is comprised of twenty cards, ten of which of are of hands and numbers counting from one to ten and the other ten contain only the grids.

Related press: Poster - Numbers Speak Volumes: Boetti and Bennett, Press Release

10 May 2007 — 9 June 2007

Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen was born in New York City in 1950 and has lived in Johannesburg South Africa for almost 30 years. Beginning by documenting the small dorps or villages of rural South Africa, Ballen’s photography moved on in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s to focus on their inhabitants. By the mid 1990’s his principal subjects were the white underclass of South Africa, a largely marginalized group that is rarely thought to exist. Ballen’s images of these disaffiliated people began to move into a more collaborative, constructed effort between subject and photographer; his sitters would act where previously his pictures, however troubling, fell firmly into the category of documentary photography. In the fall of 2005, Phaidon Press produced its second book by the artist, entitled “Shadow Chamber”. The book focuses on the interactions between the people, animals and or objects that inhabit Ballen’s uniquely built image space. Ballen’s photographs have become painterly and sculptural in ways not immediately associated with photographs. References to the stage-sets and characters of Beckett plays, to the painted cages and fleshy torments of Francis Bacon paintings abound in Ballen’s own claustrophobic, psychologically- charged scenes. Sebastian Smee has written that “Ballen’s photographs confront us with things we fear and things we cherish, then sow confusion between the two”.

Related press: Direct, Disturbing and Unapologetic,

21 March 2007 — 28 April 2007

Peter von Tiesenhausen

Through his museum installations, painting, drawing, sculpture, video and performance Peter von Tiesenhausen interrogates all manner of natural cycles. The exhibition “kleiner Mord” is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery. Peter von Tiesenhausen was born in British Columbia in 1959 and lives in northern Alberta. Public exhibitions in Canada include the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art; the Mendel Art Gallery; the Illingworth Kerr Gallery and the Edmonton Art Gallery among others. In 1997 he began the five-year project “Figure Journey” which involved the open transport of five large, figurative wood sculptures across 35,000 kms, including every province, surrounding all the territories and passing over the waters of three oceans and the negotiation of the Northwest Passage, effectively navigating the perimeter of Canada. In 2005 he set a legal precedent by successfully claiming copyright of his land as an autonomous work of art, thereby protecting it from encroaching oil and gas interests.

Of his painting John Bentley Mays has written:

“The confrontation with the reality of death…has inspired Peter von Tiesenhausen’s painting, and perhaps all Western art that endures. The true horizon in his canvases is mortality; every passage of dark brushwork speaks of the menace that haunts even our happiest hours. The high quality of von Tiesenhausen’s engagement with the greatest of all mysteries sustains his painting at a level far above the single-note samness of most landscape art.”

Related press: N/A

15 January 2007 — 3 March 2007

Chris Cran
Marcel van Eeden
Roger Ballen
Massimo Guerrera
Martin Bennett

White Noise begins with three paintings by Chris Cran from his Sublime Sales Series: “Toreador,” “Miracle Hand” and “Plaque” (all 2003). Each work incorporates a half-toned image of a 50’s era salesman whose gaze holds the viewer with the sense of confident outcome. To his left, against identical blazing yellow grounds, various images appear to be on offer: a bullfight poster in one work, a mirror with a hand making the OK sign in another and a third with a kitsch plaque that reads “It starts when you sink in his arms… and ends with your arms in the sink.” The fourth and final work in the front gallery is a drawing by van Eeden which proclaims “300 yrs of white oppresion” (sic). This work is part of the artist’s ongoing series of daily drawings (begun 1993) which take as their reference any existing image that preceded 1965, the year he was born. This massive series, entitled “Encyclopedia Of My Death,” faithfully seeks to reproduce in graphite the pre-history of the artist, a world he never knew, the boundless maw of long-gone moments. In this manner “300 yrs…” while appearing to be a contemporary take on race relations is in fact a calm facsimile of a now-forgotten statement of protest, originally misspelled in its haste and anger. United with the three Cran paintings of the bland white businessman with his can-do smile, the van Eeden contributes to a rather blunt sense of a white (and male) dominated arena unfolding.

In the second gallery are two photographs by Roger Ballen (who has never shown in Canada). The photographer has taken his principal subject to be the white underclass of South Africa, where he has lived for the last thirty years. In these images we are confronted with a group of people that is rarely thought to exist in South Africa, and who are often met with little sympathy given that for all their poverty, inbreeding and miserable conditions, they remain white and thus a de facto element of political privilege. In fact they are economically oppressed and exist in a fringe state. Here both the swaggering confidence of the besuited icon in Cran’s paintings and the finger-pointing fact in van Eeden’s drawing is undermined. Adjacent to the Ballen photographs is a large sculpture in white hydrostone by Massimo Guerrera. The Montreal artist is well-known for his sensual investigations of corporeal bonding and dissolution. This sculpture is a void whose shape suggests an engorged white vagina. It is also simultaneously indicates a mold of a head, the plaster having surrounded the skull but furthermore been poured down the throat. There, once solidified, a palpable, positive form is given to a negative cavity, a voice precluded by white dust.

The last work in the exhibition is a large “Grey Volume Painting” from a 1996 series by Martin Bennett. These paintings were executed in oil on canvas and then sanded down to varying degrees such that the emerging weave of the canvas provides its own layer of visual reference. Governed by this white constellation of canvas flecks Grey Volume Painting (16) radiates a measured, fugitive sense of space and chiaroscuro. In acoustical terms ‘white noise’ is generally an irritant, a vague all-over sound. In the context of the exhibition the term is perhaps best applied to the curatorial premise itself: that of employing diverse works that were not explicitly generated with racial politics in mind, to elide the question of race and political power.

Related press: N/A Press Release

6 December 2006 — 10 December 2006

Massimo Guerrera
Marcel van Eeden
Sylvain Bouthillette
Kent Dorn
Roger Ballen
Martin Bennett

a fair in Miami

Related press: N/A

18 November 2006 — 6 January 2007

Massimo Guerrera

A new installation of sculptures, drawings and plants (grown from the seeds of food served two years before at the previous version of the installation).

Related press: Massimo Guerrera wins the Prix Ozias Leduc (2001), Terence Dick (Massimo Guerrera), Canadian Art (Massimo Guerrera), Massimo Guerrera at the Darling Foundry,

9 November 2006 — 13 November 2006

Roger Ballen
Sylvain Bouthillette
Jack Burman
Massimo Guerrera
Marcel van Eeden
Martin Bennett
Chris Cran

The Toronto Art Fair

Related press: N/A

12 October 2006 — 12 November 2006

Harold Klunder

The second solo show of paintings by the esteemed Canadian artist.

“...so purely and inexhaustibly visual they tend to beggar the language of critical discourse.” - The Globe and Mail

“Klunder makes paintings that are symphonies, great masterworks of perfectly weighted color and form.” - The National Post

Related press: N/A

9 September 2006 — 7 October 2006

Kent Dorn

Kent Dorn’s paintings are slow accumulations: they take on paint to a degree that eventually projects them into strong relief. From the thinnest of backgrounds Dorn builds up his imagery - of hikers at the edge of a cliff, newlyweds in a park, a body thawing in the Spring snow and flash-lit candles on a banquet table - over several weeks. The canvas is further punctuated by coloured pins and details made of collaged-paper. This method of handling paint troubles the reading of the surface: backpacks, arms, hands, jaws and foliage are all thrust into topographical prominence. The paint itself becomes the subject of the work and the armature for the narratives emerging from within its encrusted confines.

Born in 1977 in South Carolina Kent Dorn graduated with an M.F.A. from the University of Houston in 2005. Most recently his work was included in “Monster Painting” with Andrew Guenther, Jose Lerma and Katherine Bernhardt among others (McClain Gallery, 2005).

Related press: N/A

19 August 2006 — 3 September 2006

Massimo Guerrera
Jack Burman
Roger Ballen
Chris Cran
Christian Eckart
Eli Langer
Trevor Mahovsky
Wade Kramm

The full title was:
“Many Shades Of The Departed Are Occupied Solely In Licking At The Waves Of The River Of Death Because It Flows From Our Direction And Still Has The Salty Taste Of Our Seas. Then The River Rears Back In Disgust, The Current Flows The Opposite Way And Brings The Dead Drifting Back Into Life. But They Are Happy, Sing Songs Of Thanksgiving, And Stroke The Indignant Waters: a group show”

Related press: NOW Magazine,

25 May 2006 — 25 June 2006

Sylvain Bouthillette

Second solo show by the montreal artist

Related press: Santo Subito, THE FEROCIOUS COMPASSION OF SYLVAIN BOUTHILLETTE,

15 April 2006 — 20 May 2006

Jack Burman

This is the second solo exhibition with the gallery. The first, in 2004, was considered one of the key exhibitions of the Contact Festival of Photography that year. Burman’s work has been acquired by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (Ottawa), the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Museum of History of Polish Jews - Warsaw, the University of Cordoba - Argentina and numerous private collections. In 2004 the Justina Barnicke Gallery of the University of Toronto mounted a solo show while another entitled “The Afterlife” was organized in 2002 for the Palace of Culture, Warsaw. Jack Burman has a Ph.D from York University and lives in Toronto.

Since the early 1990’s Jack Burman has steadily built up a photographic practice around extremes of bodily experience. He goes to protracted lengths to obtain the necessary permission to make photographs of what he finds in anatomy labs, pathology departments, medical museums, private ethnographic collections and certain churches. This exhibition will include new large photographs of human remains as well as two images of baroque church altars, one of the Asamkirche in Bavaria and one of the Iglesia de San Francisco Javier in Tepotzotlán, Mexico.

With his calm, unmanipulated technique - Burman travels only with a large-format film camera and a backdrop - his photographs of human remains are completely at odds with the current vogue for sensationalizing the deceased body through ‘artistic’ dissection or via an injected, digital narrative. The subjects of his images also range widely across time, from a pre-Christian Egyptian mummy still shrouded in linen to 19th century vitrines of various anatomical specimens to a modern-era severed forearm and hand (which brings to mind Jeff Wall’s “Adrian Walker, artist, drawing from a specimen in a laboratory in the Department of Anatomy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver 1992”). The National Post has compared Burman’s images of anatomy specimens to a “...Chardin still-life, each body part silhouetted against a black backdrop and soaked in a velvety, atmospheric light…”. Burman’s photographs of the corporeal afterlife invite us to speculate on the body at and beyond its spatial and temporal limits.

Two images of baroque altars complete the exhibition. Burman writes that “the two altars in the show are, in essence(s), Royal Authority, with Royalty shared out among actual Kings - Bavarian or Spanish - and, ostensibly, Christ the King/Saint Francis/Mother Mary. The Asamkirche is in Bavarian Munich, the birthing place of the Nazis, while the Iglesia de San Francisco (the saint of poverty) is near Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, the seat of Spanish Vice-regal genocide.” For Burman “the altar is Royalty + Worshippers joined as The World. As All….dressed in The Veil of Order (with its complex symmetries, studied colour gradations, iterations of scriptural narrative, assembled by committee).” If these sites of writhing form are seen as All then the images of the dead become their counterpoint where “Rodenstock optics, in large format, render out each pore of not-Allness, just this body, this One.” Formally, however, one finds a connection: Burman has written that “the bodies and parts of bodies on steel worktables or in museum jars are present in a baroque amplitude, measured in pores, strands of hair, flakes of corroded skin, increments of pure tone…..[while the] altars, in Bavaria and Vice-regal Mexico, overreaching in physical amplitude, are measured in a young crucified body, or richly draped saint, or dark-haired Madonna bonded each to the rest by gilded woods and pure tone, applied by hand.” In presenting photographs of altars and of the dead, issues of transience, mortality, the aims of science, the architectural power and hegemonic reach of religion, the spectacle of desire, the spiritual versus the political all come to the fore.

Related press: N/A

11 March 2006 — 9 April 2006

Evan Penny
Gabriel Vormstein
Massimo Guerrera
Marcel van Eeden
Spring Hurlbut
Jack Burman
Peter von Tiesenhausen

‘Within A Budding Grove’ brings together sculpture, photography, drawing, painting and post-war teaching material that, taken collectively, indicates a teeming world of fecund possibility, seed dispersal and the flowering of connective means.

Anchoring the exhibition is Evan Penny’s 1983, hyper-realist, 4/5 life-size sculpture ‘Ali’ with her voluptuous features suggesting a contemporary Venus of Willendorf. Gabriel Vormstein’s large watercolour and gouache ‘Tiny Feet’ is an appropriation of a famous Egon Schiele nude but rendered now on German newsprint. Massimo Guerrera presents two recent works on paper, one a large portrait of the artist with multiple figures emerging from his legs, arms and mouth and the other a highly articulated drawing of a threesome whose corporeal limits seem to have dissolved. Peter von Tiesenhausen’s thickly wrought painting, ‘Burden’, meanwhile, suggests a supine woman at post-partum birth. A school chart from a New York biology class in the 50’s reveals the various strategies that plants (with inadvertently suggestive names) employ for seed dispersal in a ecologically rich situation. A work from Spring Hurlbut’s Oology series takes a page from a natural history text with an illustrated typology of eggs that has been subtly made three dimensional with the seamless insertion of a real egg painted to mimic the rest of its printed brethren. As a womb-shape bulging from the page the egg revitalizes what had been only dryly catalogued before. Jack Burman, a Toronto photographer known for his large-scale images of anatomy specimens in medical museums, here shows a hydrocephalic head of a baby. Doomed to a painfully short existence in real life the infant has been timelessly preserved in its vitrine and on film. Lastly Marcel van Eeden, a Dutch artist who since 1993 has made a drawing a day based on any source that preceded 1965, the year of his birth, here presents a text fragment perhaps lifted from a old science book which reads: “...side your body’s cells - and you are made of trillions of these. each cell is a Lilliputian galaxy…”

Related press: N/A

26 January 2006 — 4 March 2006

Chris Cran

Clint Roenisch is pleased to present a small survey of work made between 1980 and 2006 by Chris Cran, considered one of Canada’s most important and visually inquisitive painters. Cran has emphasized the process of perception, optical phenomena, image coherence and the role of the photographic as key components to his work. This practice, which has roamed across the spectrum from figuration to abstraction, often melding disparate techniques into the same painting, has also usually included an overt sense of humour and visual wit.

Born in 1949 in Ocean Falls, British Columbia Chris Cran graduated from the Alberta College of Art in 1979 and first came to prominence in the late 1980’s with a series of large self-portraits in oil which were shown at the Art Gallery of Windsor under the title “Loved By Millions.” In ‘Self-Portrait Accepting A Cheque For The Commission Of This Painting,’ for example, the artist and the collector who bought the painting are shown in suits shaking hands and holding the cheque. ‘Double Self-Portrait Wanting To Know What I’m Doing Home So Late’ (included in the current exhibition) presents the artist as unimpressed housewife and wayward husband simultaneously. ‘My Face In Your Home’ (1986) meanwhile, lays bare the ultimate agenda behind all artist’s self-portraits. Cran’s subsequent paintings through the 90’s, in shows with titles like “Chris Cran: The First Hundred Years”, were less concerned with narrative and parody than with the mechanics of seeing and the eye’s innate capacity to build optical space. Working with a half-tone dot technique that recalled both newsprint and pop art Cran conflated art-historical subject matter - the still life, landscapes, religious imagery - with stripes painted in such strong contrast as to frustrate the resolution of the work. Beginning in 2002 Cran made a series of paintings called Sublime Sales which incorporated a half-toned image of a 50’s era salesman who appeared to be writing up the contract for various screened images presented on his right, from Whistler’s mother to Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, effectively collapsing the space between commerce and the often sublime experience of viewing art.

Chris Cran has exhibited widely since 1980. A large mid-career retrospective, “Chris Cran: Surveying The Damage 1977 –1997” toured Canadian museums with a catalogue from 1998 to 2001. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada; the Edmonton Art Gallery and several other Canadian museums; in the corporate collections of McCarthy Tétrault; Osler Hoskin Harcourt; Petro-Canada and others along with many private collection

Related press: Canadian Art (Chris Cran: The Physics of Admiration),

4 November 2005 — 18 December 2005

Christian Eckart

The artist’s first solo show in Toronto.

Related press: Pornopticon Flyer, Christian Eckart at Clint Roenisch,

16 September 2005 — 23 October 2005

Jay Johnson

The first exhibition in Toronto of Jay Johnson’s sculpture. Trained in music and industrial design Johnson builds elegant, strange and elaborate work, often with kinetic or audio components – parts that lurch, wheeze, chime and scrape – that are culled from junk shops, garages and old workshops. Johnson mechanically combines these into frail-looking machines that go through all manner of motion and sound to suggest ideas about gender relations, desire, power, death, luck, memory, primordial urges and subconscious fears. Johnson’s work has parallels with the sculpture of Alexander Calder and Joseph Cornell, the photographs of Weegee, the drawings of Vija Celmins and the paintings of Neo Rauch. Michael Scott, art critic of the Vancouver Sun, has written that Johnson’s sculpture “mechanizes the stuff of dreams.”

Related press: N/A

7 July 2005 — 10 July 2005

Ryan Foerster

The Ryan Foerster Show. Ryan takes photographs of his friends in ways that say much about youth, exuberance, spontaneity, trust, intimacy, openness, humour, absurdity and, yes, occasionally being ridiculously fucked-up on booze and drugs. Sitting well within a genre of photography colonized by the likes of Larry Clark and Terry Richardson, Foerster’s imagery has none of Clark’s class-based, violent darkness or Richardson’s middle-aged sexual predation of his nubile subjects. Foerster is a peer and pal of the people he photographs. Just as in John Water’s film, Pecker, about a young, earnest photographer that shoots his coterie with an innocence that, by the end of the film, has the ‘serious art world’ toasting “to the end of irony!” Foerster says only that he takes photographs because he likes his friends. His benignly chaotic scenes of bacchanalian revelry, self-endangerment, shamelessness, bodily curiosity and reckless pleasure is a testament to the unfettered freedom of being young. What is poignant about these pan-sexual, anti-authoritarian, semi-innocent rec-room and bonfire indulgences is knowing that soon enough time will (maybe) settle everyone and everything down. Caught by the flash of Foerster’s camera, naked and wasted in a pond, surrounded by laughing friends is a vivid record of the follies of youth but it is something deeper too. As Whitman writes in Song Of Myself “...I am less a reminder of Property and Qualities, and more a reminder of Life itself…”

Related press: Happenis Flyer, Now Magazine - Ryan Foerster,

26 May 2005 — 3 July 2005

Martin Bennett

The title alludes to how the work is made and to how the eye and mind deals with the imagery. Bennett’s paintings and drawings of denuded trees, statues, airborne birds and meandering rivers are presented in a complex, sophisticated manner that confounds the apprehension of these quiet scenes. Based on photographs taken by the artist, the imagery is projected onto canvas and then painted by hand using various arrangements of bars, stripes and patterns. In effect these formal systems become a second, abstract painting nested within the first, figurative work. To finish Bennett meticulously sands down the oil paint to such a degree that the weave of the canvas begins to show through, creating a third, vivid field of visual reference. In this way much of the inherent tactility and lusciousness of oil paint is suspended in favour of a slow, simmering and more elusive method of presenting the image. The paintings make radiant, simultaneous, optical forays into the regions of abstraction, photography, figuration and the reproduction while being none of these at once. With a keen and sober analysis of the rich history of painting Bennett has for the last ten years made work unique to his vision but deeply aware of references that range widely from Canaletto to Magritte and Morandi to Richter.

Related press: Form, Function, Flattery Flyer,

14 April 2005 — 22 May 2005

Harold Klunder

After more than three decades of working Klunder’s current paintings are among the most assured of his career despite his own feeling that the act of painting is “a very humbling thing.” Using a refined vocabulary of forms that are uniquely his, Klunder builds many-layered works that suggest ideas of living time; primordial biology and the procreative impulse; the shifting nature of personality and the history of painting itself. Klunder shares Dutch roots with both Mondrian and de Kooning and his own work seems well-situated between the ordered calm of the former and the unmoored flights of the latter.

Klunder has said that the show’s title “is connected to how a painting evolves, from an Ideal, a search for what I think I am after, to what it inevitably becomes, Actual. From a thought to an object.” Klunder works on single paintings for long periods, sometimes years at a time, and in doing so they become invested with a deep, mutable, interior sense of self. His paintings are vivid evidence of his effort to give shape to consciousness itself.

Related press: N/A

3 March 2005 — 10 April 2005

Marcel van Eeden

The first exhibition in Canada of the acclaimed Dutch artist.

Related press: N/A

22 January 2005 — 27 February 2005

Peter von Tiesenhausen
Sylvain Bouthillette
Christian Eckart
Martin Bennett
Jack Burman
Jay Johnson
Seth Scriver

Our gossamer spirit versus our rickety life…

Related press: Beauty Supply flyer, Press Release

17 November 2004 — 22 December 2004

Massimo Guerrera

For his first solo show with the gallery the artist presents an installation of his ongoing project, Darboral. An amalgamation of the words art, aborescence and orality Darboral, at its core, makes a gentle claim for the possibility of a universal body-being (corps-etre). To this end Guerrera initiates collective and individual meetings, by invitation or by chance (‘unspecified rendez-vous’) in which the development of human relations is paramount. Inside his benign environment of carpets, insulation panels, sculptural objects, food, photographs, drawings and containers, visitors are urged to extend corporeal limits, transform relationships and dissolve boundaries.

Related press: Massimo Guerrera review,

16 September 2004 — 31 October 2004

Sylvain Bouthillette

Sylvain Bouthillette was born in Montréal in 1963. His work oscillates between sculpture, prints, drawings and painting. In each medium Bouthillette uses animal motifs, references to cosmic space, mental and kinetic energy and Buddhist meditation to demonstrate that confusion, impermanence, instability, ambiguity, uncertainty and the ridiculous are all sources of self-liberation and beauty.

Related press: A Beautiful Trip Into The Sky Of One Mind, Press Release

1 July 2004 — 31 July 2004

Herald Nix

Herald Nix was born in 1951 in Salmon Arm, in the interior of British Columbia. He lives in the farmhouse where he grew up after being away for some time making his living as a singer/songwriter. In his youth he went to the Vancouver School of Art, now called Emily Carr, and has painted for many years. Nix makes almost daily trips into the bush around Salmon Arm to paint small landscapes outdoors in oil on board. Lucy Lippard, in her book, The Lure Of The Local, said that ‘place’ was ‘space plus memory’ and Nix invests his paintings with both qualities. The work is just as much about the paint as it is the place. The exhibition is complemented by a small selection of photographs by Mark Ruwedel, Paul Buchanan and various anonymous vintage works, all courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.

Related press: N/A

13 May 2004 — 20 June 2004

Jack Burman

Jack Burman is a Toronto photographer whose principal work includes the extreme-baroque altars of Hispanic churches; the landscape of WWII extermination camps; and human remains from medical sources. For his exhibition at Clint Roenisch, Burman will present recent large-scale images of anatomical specimens and autopsy work, shot in Argentina, Brazil, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland and the United States.

As part of Burman’s interest in some extreme forms of experience these images arise from years of bureaucratic negotiation for permission to work with such remains. “Physicality,” W.G. Sebald has said, “is most strongly sculpted and its ‘nature’ most perceptible on the indistinct borderline with transcendency.” In Burman’s work, anatomy and pathology department storerooms are on this borderline (like an extermination site in southern Poland, or a baroque retablo in a Mexican village). Writing of his solo exhibition at the University of Toronto in 2003 John Bentley Mays noted that “his anatomical photographs…invite us to make the ever-dangerous surrender to the exquisite.”

Related press: Canadian Art, Press Release

1 April 2004 — 9 May 2004

Martin Bennett

After graduating from the Alberta College of Art Martin Bennett began making black and white paintings that had the appearance of the photocopy but held the weight of painting. This process, which questioned what was authentic, gave a laboriously rendered, hand-made image the look of a faded reproduction while still cultivating the aura of an original. Over the next ten years (and several solo shows) Bennett’s imagery moved across the spectrum from figuration to abstraction, ultimately arriving at a gorgeous, grayscale endgame with his Static Image Paintings. In England in 2000 he introduced colour into his palette and a method of putting it down that seemed to produce two paintings simultaneously: one a pattern of pure colour, the other a monochrome landscape. The paintings optically distilled into a symbiotic arrangement of abstraction and figuration. As Gary Michael Dault commented in the Globe and Mail, “The originals are still there someplace, but you have to get to them through a handful of vista-compromising techniques. …Their freshness - which they have aplenty- is a slap in the chops.” With “Television Cubism” Bennett presents a new episode of colour paintings on a channel uniquely his.

Related press: N/A

26 February 2004 — 28 March 2004

Peter von Tiesenhausen

Peter von Tiesenhausen was born in 1959 on a farm in northern Alberta where he still lives today. He has garnered a significant reputation for his sculpture, paintings, museum installations and land works, often using natural materials. Von Tiesenhausen’s work evokes the majesty and violent perfection of the natural work and its rhythms. He is interested in investing contemporary existence with a more profound connection to the radiant energies of nature, in a way that is neither pure ecology nor distanced irony.

New paintings, a bronze, prints and drawings

Related press: N/A Press Release

15 January 2004 — 22 February 2004

Sylvain Bouthillette
Raymond Pettibon
Andre Kertesz
"Diamond" Jim Brady
Douglas Walker
Michael Gauley
Gabor Szilasi
Graham Gillmore
Massimo Guerrera
Phil Bergson
Paul Buchanan
Nan Goldin
Peter Horvath
Seth Scriver
Andre Ethier
Lou Stoumen

A group show from the early days….

Related press: NOW Magazine,

22 November 2003 — 20 December 2003

Harold Klunder
David Liss
Martin Bennett
Chris Cran
Seth Scriver
Jack Burman
Chris Bennett
Douglas Walker and others

This was the first show.

Related press: N/A Press Release