Through his museum installations, painting, drawing, sculpture, video and performance Peter von Tiesenhausen interrogates all manner of natural cycles. The exhibition “Kleine 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 sameness of most landscape art.”
