Lights Out! Canadian Painting from the 1960s
VANCOUVER — The Vancouver Art Gallery has raided its extensive permanent collection for an exhibition that focuses exclusively on painting from the 1960s. Called Lights Out!, the exhibition of 88 paintings looks at a medium that was undergoing big changes in the decade. When it began, painting was still considered the premier form of art making. By the end of the ’60s, not only were artists starting to work in new media such as video and photography, they were also exploring entirely new approaches such as performance and conceptual art.
The title comes from a painting by Michael Snow called Lights Out! In the 1960s, Snow repeatedly used an image of a walking woman in profile in everything from photography and drawings to sculpture and prints. Called the Walking Woman series, it became one of the country’s most recognized images during the decade.
In the painting in the VAG, the woman is painted mostly in black and beige. The figure, however, is breaking down. Lines of green and yellow that shape her arms and torso disregard conventions of realistic painting by distorting her curvaceous body and following the black shape that defines her leg and the background. Figure and ground become fused into one.
Besides the literal title, Lights Out! can also be taken as a description of what was happening to painting during the 1960s. By the time the decade was over, painting had been superseded by new media and approaches to art.
It appeared to be lights out for painting.
But until that happened, artists across the country experimented and challenged traditions. As the works in the exhibition show, they used oils and vibrant new acrylic paints, and they changed the shapes of canvases from the traditional rectangle. They made paintings out of plaster that were almost sculpture in low relief. One even has a hole in the surface.
The diversity of works in the exhibition illustrates that painting in Canada is more than landscapes by the Group of Seven. Works by artists such as Jack Bush show that abstraction found a home north of the 49th parallel even if it was sometimes seen as an American import.
Lights Out! starts out with one of the strengths from the gallery’s permanent collection: art from Quebec.
At the entrance are two dynamic paintings by Claude Tousignant that look as fresh as the day they were painted. One is in his signature round target shape. Called Accelerateur Chromatique, its concentric band of colours from dark green on the outside to lime green in the bull’s-eye pulsate with the pure energy of colour. Next to it is his Odalisque, a lozenge-shaped painting in blue, red, orange, green and pink. In art history, the title and horizontal shape refers to the odalisque, a reclining female slave often s hown on her side with her back to the viewer. By giving an abstract work such a loaded title that historically was used for figurative paintings, Tousignant’s painting signals both its break with, and its modern interpretation of, the past.
Two paintings across from each other show the diversity in painting in Montreal in the 1960s. On one side is Alfred Pellan’s Jardin mecanique, an a imaginary garden of sunflower-like plants with mechanical innards. It has bright green cell-like shapes dotted with bright pink centres and spidery green veins against a pink background. The colours are so exuberant, they made me think of a garden on a summer’s day.
Across from it is a painting that is its chromatic and formal opposite.
Yves Gaucher’s Untitled (JN-J1 68 G-1), 1968, is a big grey sea of a canvas from edge to edge. Across its grey vastness are zips of lighter grey at the top and bottom, six of them. They look like little tears or openings in space: The lighter ones at the top project out while the darker ones recede.
When the media tour reached Gaucher’s painting, it gave the VAG’s senior curator Ian Thom a chance to tell a story about the painting when it was first exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1969.
“I saw the exhibition,” Thom said. “It was a rather remarkable show because you walked into the exhibition and all the paintings looked the same colour initially.
“It was only after you spent some considerable amount of time in the space, that you realized that the paintings were purple-grey, some were red-grey, some were blue-grey and so on.”
Thom said he recalls being struck at the time by Gaucher’s subtle use of colour that were animated by the zips of grey — what he called “messages that shoot across the canvas.”
Roughly laid out from east to west, the exhibition includes two paintings by Bush, my favourite among the group of artists known as Painters Eleven from Ontario.
In addition to Snow’s Lights Out! is another walking figure. Greg Curnoe’s Myself Walking North in the Tweed Coat depicts the nationalistic Canadian artist in profile. Walking with purpose, he’s heading north for a reason: To get away from the influence of the United States to the south.
Artists from B.C. are well represented in Lights Out!
Roy Kiyooka’s Shaula is a beautifully calming painting of horizontally oriented blue lozenges floating in a blue space.
An Untitled work by Michael Morris combines three triptych-like sections of blues, reds, and oranges with stripes, chevrons and circles. My eye kept dancing around the painting that’s just on the edge of being too optically active.
One of the province’s iconic art images is Maxwell Bates’s Beautiful BC, a roughly painted work depicting a woman with red lipstick looking out the rear window of a car with Beautiful BC licence plates. Adding to the painting’s sense of unease is the black profile of a figure in the front seat.
kevingriffin@vancouversun.com
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