Gabor Szilasi: The Eloquence of the Everyday

Organized by the Musée d’art de Joliette and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography

May 14 to August 14, 2011

The Kelowna Art Gallery is pleased to be bringing this retrospective exhibition of photographs by the venerable Montreal-based photographer, Gabor Szilasi, to the Okanagan. The show has been curated by Montreal photographic historian David Harris, and is organized by the Musée d’art de Joliette and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. It comes to Kelowna as part of the National Gallery of Canada’s On Tour program.

Szilasi was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1928 and emigrated to Canada in 1957. He settled in Montreal in 1959 to live and work. The exhibition spans the artist’s entire career: his early work in Budapest, and then the wonderful and varied images that document a vanished way of life in various rural regions of Quebec shot in the 1970s. Along with these are some excellent examples of Szilasi’s period street scenes of Montreal that are incredibly evocative of life and events in that city. Szilasi also produced numerous portraits, both in Hungary and in Canada, that are intense studies of people, often in their own domestic surroundings. All these works teem with life, and move from the particular to the universal in their addressing of overarching and basic emotional and existential themes.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major monograph on the artist with an essay by guest curator David Harris.

Exhibition proudly sponsored by