Canadian Art in the Twentieth Century by Joan Murray

Author:Joan Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781459722361
Publisher: Dundurn

Fig. 179. Joyce Wieland (1931-1998) Artist on Fire, 1983 Oil on canvas, 106.7 x 129.5 cm Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa

Fig. 180. John MacGregor (b. 1944) Pro Humanitae Tempus (Time for all Mankind), 1983 Papier maché, styrofoam, plywood, acrylic, steel supports, 261.6 x 229.2 x 241.3 cm Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa

Fig. 181. Ulysse Comtois (b. 1931-1999) Column No. 6, 1967 Aluminum, 137.7 x 22.2 x 22.0 cm Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal

John MacGregor, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, pursued a subject that involved an absurdist world of domestic objects — real chairs, tables, and pianos, often bent in serpentine curves, with the contours outlined in black. “I do uncommon things with mundane objects to tantalize, amuse and finally communicate,” he said.16 In the mid 1970s, process-driven, with dashing energy and brilliant colour, MacGregor turned to abstraction to paint some of his most successful and ambitious works. After a bout with abstraction, MacGregor reapproached the vocabulary of domestic objects that stamped his work with an immediately identifiable personality. In Pro Humanitae Tempus (Time For All Mankind) (1983, fig. 180), MacGregor weighed in for the first time with large-scale sculpture. The clock, of moulded paper pulp and plywood, cleverly extends into three-dimensions, half virtual, half real.

Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s, like painting, expanded on a formal base drawn from Cubism and Minimal art. In Montreal, Ulysse Comtois, who had been a painter on the periphery of the Automatists, turned to welded metal sculpture with a playful format after visiting a New York exhibition of the Cubist sculptor Julio Gonzalez. Comtois was keenly interested in scrap industrial materials, space, and in the participation of the viewer through the manipulation of the mechanisms of the sculpture. In Column No. 6 (1967, fig. 181), the aluminum plates on the steel base fan out tautly and can be moved to change the shape of the sculpture: the result has a precision and vitality that only looks effortless.

In the mid-1970s and 1980s, Roland Poulin and Claude Mongrain became known for their thoughtful, subtle, abstract sculpture. Poulin, who works in Sainte-Angèle de Monnoir, Quebec, regarded an encounter with Borduas’s Black Star (1957, fig. 103) as his starting-point as an artist. Poulin graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts de Montreal in 1969; the following year, he worked as an assistant to sculptor Mario Mérola, one of his professors at the school. Poulin’s interests, he found, lay, however, with the abstract painting of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko — resonant abstract art imbued with a spiritual dimension. In the mid 1970s, Poulin’s monolithic work expanded on a Minimalist vocabulary of elementary geometric forms combined with the errant notions of Post-Minimalism. From 1980 to 1985, his signature style in sculpture became a periphery around an empty core, both occupying and enclosing space, as in Place (1980, fig. 182). His work became ever more spare and reductive. In Shadows in the Angles (1981-1982, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal), for instance, rectangular cement pieces cast shadows.

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