Artist-in-Residence AGNS Yarmouth Anselm Kiefer - Art Gallery of ...

8
Acquisitions
Spotlight
while the AGNS relies heavily on donations
to acquire art, it does not accept all offers.
AGNS curatorial staff assess and debate the
value of each work both on its own and
in conjunction with the AGNS collection.
Does it help place an artistic development
in context within our collection? Does it
allow for useful contrast or comparison with
other works? Does the subject or artist have
distinct bearing on Nova Scotian, Atlantic
Canadian, or Canadian artistic heritage?
Does it allow the AGNS to better tell the
story of Canadian art from an Atlantic
Canadian perspective?
The following are some of our recent acquisitions,
with excerpts of notes regarding these
pieces by our various curatorial staff.
Claude Tousignant
Noir-gris ou Same-same (1980-81)
Born in Montreal in 1932, Claude Tousignant
studied at the École des Beaux-arts de
Montréal where he specialized in printmaking,
painting and lithography. In the 1950s
he became a member of Les Plasticiens, a
group made up of a generation of painters
who eschewed figuration and for whom
painting was, and is, “paint, forms, lines,
colours and textures.”
This diptych is a seminal example of a
signature style during a fifteen-year period
between the late seventies and early nineties.
As early as 1956, with the watershed
painting Monochrome Orange, Tousignant
would pursue painting that was devoid of
external referents and, in a true modernist
approach, kept as its central tenet the
“object-ness” of painting stripped of all
relative subjectivity. Tousignant’s paintings
of the 1960s have become emblematic of
that era, drawing comparisons to ellsworth
Kelly, Ad Reinhardt and Kenneth Noland.
These flat, simple, visually engaging colour
field paintings would eventually lead to work
in sculpture, printmaking and installation.
JOURNAL Spring & Summer 2009
while the AGNS has works from the artist’s
early colour-field paintings, we lack examples
from this important groundbreaking
fifteen-year period. our ability to present
this history is significantly enhanced by the
donation of Tousignant’s work. AGNS is the
premier collector in the Atlantic region for
the work by Les Plasticiens. The passions and
insight behind this outstanding work will be
an invaluable contribution to our curatorial
programming.
Robert Zingone,
Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art
Fernand Toupin
Jeux sur neige, I & II, 1989
As one of the four founding members of
the group Les Plasticiens and a life member
of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts,
fernand Toupin’s role in Canadian Art History
is an important one. over fifty years since the
release of the Plasticiens’ important manifesto,
their enduring impact on Canadian art
is apparent. Artists in the AGNS collection
who owe a debt to the group are many.
Jeux sur neige, I & II, is a wonderful diptych
typical of Toupin’s matierist painting. Heavy,
yet friable paint extrudes from the surface,
recalling the architectural approach of Les
Plasticiens, but without the strict geometry.
This work is reflective of his later organic,
lyrical approach to painting that, while still
non-representational, explores texture and
space, using colours to enhance but not
overwhelm. This work speaks to not only the
other Plasticien artists in the AGNS collection,
but also to the greater network of Quebec
artists. Comparing this to a landscape
by Jean-Paul Lemieux—a friend of Toupin
whom he much admired—or to works by
Tousignant, Riopelle, Mcewen, all of whom
are represented in the AGNS collection,
provides for an exciting dialogue about the
evolution of art and artists from this region
and their far-reaching influences.
Sarah fillmore
Acting Chief Curator
and Curator of exhibitions
Alex Katz
The Swimmer, 1992
Alex Katz’s flattened figurative representations
of everyday subject matter, friends,
family, and the land around them have
become icons of contemporary American art.
Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Katz studied at The
Cooper union in New York and at Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.
Katz’s artworks delve the shallow visual space
that highlights the two-dimensional nature
of paintings. The Swimmer is an excellent
example of Katz’s masterful treatment
of figures and landscape. This serigraph
provides the Gallery with its second example
of Katz’s work.
Nova Scotia and the Maritime provinces have
always enjoyed a rich artistic exchange with
the united States. Artists have roamed up
and down the Coast long before Homeland
Security clamped its iron gate across our
notably porous border. Through this and
other works in this donation, the Gallery is
able to tell a cross border story—examining
commonalities and differences from the
point of view of the printmaking medium.
Sarah fillmore
Acting Chief Curator
and Curator of exhibitions