Gustav Hahn
Mary Riter Hamilton
Jean Voltaire Hector
Otto Reinhold Jacobi
Harold Klunder
Pat McGuire
Arne Linder Olsen
René Richard
Margaux Smith
Winsom Winsom
Photographer unknown
Opening: Saturday, May 18th from 2-5pm
Exhibition: 18 May - 29 June, 2024
190 St Helen's Avenue, Toronto
Hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 12 to 5pm
CRG is pleased to present Crossings, a group show that spans several generations of artists.
Gustav Hahn (German-Cdn, 1866 - 1962) was a muralist and interior decorator who pioneered the Jugendstil or Art Nouveau style in Canada. As a teacher at the Ontario College of Art, the Royal Ontario Museum and Toronto's Central Technical School, he contributed to the development of many Canadian artists including Frank Carmichael and Franz Johnston. As a young man, Hahn attended art school in Stuttgart, Germany. After immigrating to Toronto in 1888, he was employed as a designer by a major interior decorating firm. He created murals in public buildings such as the Ontario Legislature and the former Toronto City Hall, as well as churches and the residences of local elite.
Mary Riter Hamilton (1867 - 1954) was a Canadian artist who spent much of her career painting abroad in countries including Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, and the United States. Born in Teeswater, Ont., in 1867 - the same year as Confederation - Hamilton had by age 26 already suffered the deaths of both her husband (who died of an infection) and stillborn infant. The family that she had been hoping to build for herself had been destroyed so she decided to become an artist. She studied art in Toronto and New York and later moved to Paris, where she lived for much of the period from 1903 to 1911. She was included in the prestigious Paris Salon as early as 1905. Hamilton gained renown as Canada's first female battlefield artist, pioneering an empathetic style of painting the trenches and ruined towns of Belgium and France in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. She shaped an ethical portrayal of the war by drawing attention to the war's destruction and by mourning the dead.
In 1939 Hamilton was admitted to the Provincial Mental Hospital in Essondale, BC, where she remained for the next three years. She died in acute poverty on April 5, 1954. Her ashes were transported to Port Arthur, Ont., now Thunder Bay, where she was buried beside her husband and stillborn son.
Jean Voltaire Hector was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1952. His brother, Roland Hector, encouraged him to start painting in 1977. He began by painting simple landscapes, moving on to other subjects after his brother died. Hector has since become one of the best contemporary Haitian folk artists. His paintings are generally autobiographical, often accompanied by a line or two of narrative text. They reflect his experience of daily Haitian life: family life, voodoo ceremonies, spiritual icons, medical procedures, political events, and his own love life.
Otto Reinhold Jacobi (German-Cdn, 1812 - 1901) was born in 1812 in Königsberg (Kaliningrad, Russia). At age 16 he left high school to teach in Königsberg's institute for the disabled. In 1830 financial support from his father's friends permitted him to study at the Berlin Academy of Arts. In 1832 he won a three-year stipend to attend the academy in Düsseldorf, one of Europe's most prestigious. In 1838 he married Sybille Reuter. The Prussian crown prince saw Jacobi's portrait of Reuter while visiting Düsseldorf and purchased it for twice the requested price. The sale led to his being appointed the court painter to the Duchess of Nassau in Wiesbaden, where his work became quite popular. Jacobi's dealer, Moatz Bessunger, of Liverpool, England (1853) and later Montreal (from 1855), bought his paintings by the closed crate and sold them in England and in North America. After the death of the Duchy, Jacobi visited New York in 1860. Soon after he moved to Montreal where he was asked to do a painting of the falls at Shawinigan, near Trois-Rivières, for presentation to the Prince of Wales, who was then visiting the province of Quebec. Paul Duval states that Jacobi's best works "have something of the character and luminous charm of Turner's late Alpine water colours." Jacobi died in Toronto in 1901.
Harold Klunder (Dutch-Cdn, b. 1943) is widely considered one of Canada's most important living painters. He has exhibited constantly for more than three decades since his first solo show at Sable-Castelli Gallery in 1976. In his paintings Klunder employs a refined vocabulary of forms that are uniquely his to suggest ideas of vitality and transformation, of biology and duration, of identities that are mutable and of the still-unfolding history of painting itself. Klunder works on single paintings for years at a time and in so doing they become invested with a palpable sense of lived experience, their surfaces a visceral record of his quest to give shape to consciousness itself.
Pat McGuire (1943 - 1970) was a member of the Staastas Eagle clan. His father was Sam McGuire of Ojibwaay-Irish heritage and his mother, Nora Tulip, was Haida. He was born and raised in Skidegate, Haida Gwaii, where his uncle, Joe Tulip, taught him about Haida art and culture. Patrick started drawing from an early age, and was given tools to begin carving from his Uncle Edmund Calder, who also gave him books so that he could begin studying Haida art. McGuire moved to Vancouver at 19 where an informal school of argillite carving formed around him. He was also one of the few modern Northwest Coast Native artists to produce watercolour paintings on a regular basis. Michaela McGuire has said, "Through his art he portrayed a certain loneliness, sadness for a culture that had been silenced. The feelings of an outsider looking in - like his images of lone canoes drifting in the ocean."
McGuire died of a heroin overdose at 27.
Arne Linder Olsen was born on April 22, 1911 in the town of Flakstad on the Lofoten archipelago in the Nordland region of Norway. He studied at the Statens Kunstakademi (State Academy of Fine Arts) in Oslo from 1936 -1938, travelling to Paris in 1937. He later settled in Narvik and in 1963 built his own house, designed by the Danish architect Carsten Stengaard, who was living in Narvik at the time. After World War II, Olsen did not travel much anymore, keeping to the familiar surroundings of northern Norway in his native Lofoten and near the family cottage in Efjord, which were the main inspiration for his paintings. In 1981 he traveled to Spain for an exhibition organized by the Norwegian Embassy in Madrid. This stay became a turning point, because after it the style changed, as well as the theme and the color range of the artist's artworks. Arne Linder Olsen died unexpectedly after returning from Cyprus on April 12, 1990 in his own home in Narvik of a heart attack, at the age of 79.
René Richard was born in Switzerland in 1895 and immigrated to Canada in 1911. His family settled in Cold Lake, Alberta, where he learned the ways of the coureurs des bois and trappers. During a long stay in Northern Canada in the 1920s, Richard began drawing and painting the landscapes he encountered. Eager to hone his skills, he travelled to Paris in 1927 to study painting and drawing at the Académie de La Grande Chaumière. There he visited museums and met landscape artist Clarence Gagnon, who became his mentor. In the early 1940s, Richard settled in Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec, where he continued painting regional and northern landscapes, including in Ungava, a region that he explored in 1948 and 1951. Richard enjoyed two major retrospectives of his work during his lifetime, both organized by the Musée du Québec (now the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec), in 1967 and in 1978. He received the Order of Canada in 1973 and was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1980. Richard died in 1982 at the age of 86, in Baie-Saint-Paul.
Margaux Smith uses layers of paint, drawing, and collage to convey the body's state of constant transformation. The process of revision creates semi-abstract surfaces that replicate the instability of images and bodies. Born in Toronto in 1992, Smith received a BFA from OCAD University and went on to complete a Master of Information at the University of Toronto. Smith has participated several exhibitions in Toronto, as well as internationally in China and the Netherlands.
Winsom Winsom refers to herself as "a child of the universe" who immigrated to Canada in the 1970s from Kingston, Jamaica. Winsom is a multi-media artist whose instinctive works explore themes of freedom, survivance, resilience, renewal, and African spirituality within the context of the Black Atlantic experience. Winsom has said, "As a person of many cultural heritages - African, Maroon, Arawak, Spanish and Scottish ancestries I bring to my work a spirituality which manifests itself through a syncretism of African-based religions and through deeply personal experiences. These blended elements have provided the focus of my personal spiritual exploration. Central to my art practices are seven principle deities of West African-based religions called "Orishas". They form a pantheon of godlike forces which express themselves on earth through specific elements and human attributes, creating human behaviour and so-called "happenstance" in the circumstances of life. To identify with an Orisha is to merge with nature and the elements. I have as one of my objectives the narration of the different facets of the histories of peoples of African and Arawak descent. By establishing an interrelation of political, spiritual and social concern I present a Black female imagery that is informed by my sense of location and belonging.
Photographer Unknown. The lantern slide has its origins in 17th century optical viewing devices which came to be known as "magic lanterns." The earliest slides for these consisted of hand-painted images on glass, projected by itinerant showmen telling stories about the images that were projected. In the 1840s, Philadelphia daguerreotypists William and Frederick Langenheim began experimenting with the Magic Lantern as an apparatus for displaying their photographic images. Because the opaque nature of the daguerreotype prevented its projection, the brothers looked for a medium that would create a transparent image. They employed the discoveries of the French inventor Niepce, who had discovered a way to adhere a light sensitive solution onto glass for the creation of a negative. By using that negative to print onto another sheet of glass rather than onto paper, the Langenheims were able to create a transparent positive image suitable for projection. The brothers patented their invention in 1850 and called it a Hyalotype (hyalo being the Greek word for glass). Alfred Stieglitz made lantern slides throughout the 1890s. Use of lantern slides lasted until the 1950s when their popularity began to decline with the introduction of smaller 2x2 transparencies.
