January 11 to March 9, 2014
Jock Macdonald, The Black Quartet, 1946, ink, watercolour on paper, 25.8 x 35.7 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Acquistion Fund, Photo: Teresa Healy, Vancouver Art Gallery.
The Kelowna Art Gallery is pleased and excited to be a venue for the tour of Unreal, an exhibition drawn from the holdings of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The exhibition contains work by twenty-eight artists. About half of these are contemporary Canadians, while others worked in the last century, some in Canada and some abroad. The theme of the unreal refers to areas of thought and experience beyond the everyday. Of course the zone of the fantastic contains both utopian and dystopian realms, and both are explored in this show. The works are actually grouped by sub-theme: The Unconscious, The Haunted, The Absurd, and The Disassembled.
Pieces range in medium from oil paintings to mixed-media works on paper, through to printmaking and three-dimensional sculptures. The earliest works of art in the show are from the 1940s and are automatic surrealist works in ink and watercolour done by the Canadian artist Jock Macdonald (1897-1960).
Some of the artists included have never been on exhibition in Kelowna before, for example, Francis Bacon (1909-1992), the Irish-born painter renowned for his screaming papal heads. Another is the American photography-based artist Cindy Sherman, famous for work in which she dressed and posed as women in old master paintings, or from the Hollywood cinema.
Viewers will be impressed at the range of artists included in this show, as well as the thought-provoking notions and themes the works address.
Unreal is organized and circulated by the Vancouver Art Gallery with the generous support of the Killy Foundation. Curated by Daina Augaitis, Chief Curator/Associate Director, Vancouver Art Gallery.
