Phenomenal!!!
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Blockbuster lineup to open Edmonton's art gallery
BY PAULA SIMONS, EDMONTON JOURNALOCTOBER 29, 2009COMMENTS (11)
STORYPHOTOS ( 1 )VIDEO ( 1 )
Albert Einstein. Portrait by Yousuf Karsh.
Photograph by: Art Gallery of Alberta, edmontonjournal.com
What could be better than opening Edmonton's brand new art gallery with a world-class blockbuster art show? Try four eye-popping, ear-popping marquee exhibits, the kind that folks at the Art Gallery of Alberta hope will bring people from across Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan flocking to their shiny new doors.
When the AGA opens on Jan. 31, 2010, it will do so with major shows featuring the works of Degas, Goya, Yousuf Karsh and sound installation artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. "We took a big leap of faith that the gallery would be ready on time, and that the environmental controls would be ready," says the AGA's chief curator, Catherine Crowston. "We wanted to open with big, huge, blockbuster-type shows."
The gallery's lead debut show, Degas: Figures in Motion, will feature 40 bronze sculptures and 12 works on paper by the great French Impressionist master Edgar Degas, the artist most famous for his depictions of ballerinas. The show will include a bronze casting of Degas's most famous sculpture, Little Dancer of 14 Years, a work that shocked the Paris of his day with its combination of grace and raw realism.
This isn't a dog-eared touring show that's
already made the rounds of the world's museums. It's been specially curated for the gallery by renowned Parisian
Degas scholar Anne Dumas in co-ordination with the AGA's Crowston.
Crowston spent the past 18 months coaxing loans of Degas pieces from the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery and private collectors around the world.
"It's probably the most expensive show we've ever done, just in terms of insurance and shipping," she says. "It's a major undertaking for us. It may not be biggest show we've even done in size, but it's the biggest in scope. The value of the art in this show probably easily outweighs the value of our entire new building."
The AGA's new executive director, Gilles Hebert, says he believes "it's the largest amassing of Degas works ever seen in this country. Many ballerinas will be here, day and night."
It's the kind of big-name, headline show the old Edmonton Art Gallery, so limited by its size and poor environmental controls, would never have been able to attract or display, a chance for Albertans to see the work of one of the greatest and most popular artists of the late 19th century right here.
The gallery opening will also feature Karsh: The Image Maker, a major show of the works of the great Ottawa portrait photographer.
The exhibit, created by the Portrait Gallery of Canada and the Canada Science and Technology Museum, premiered in Ottawa this summer, in honour of the centenary of Karsh's birth. It includes 40 photographs, including Karsh's iconic, defining portraits of Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and Audrey Hepburn.
The show also features more scientific exhibits analyzing Karsh's camera techniques and secret darkroom artistry, as well as an interactive component where visitors can shoot their own portraits.
"Because it's interactive, it can appeal to larger audiences," Crowston says.
But while the Degas and Karsh shows will have broad, popular appeal, the AGA is presenting some more difficult, cutting-edge work, too.
The gallery has commissioned internationally acclaimed audio artists Cardiff and Bures Miller, two ex-Albertans now based in Berlin, to create a new "sound sculpture" for the gallery's opening. Called The Storm Room, it will use layers of sound to create the aural impression of being caught in a rain storm.
At the same time, the AGA will host the North American premiere of Cardiff and Bures Miller's biggest sound installation to date, a more disturbing, less playful work called The Murder of Crows. Cardiff and Bures Miller created the physically immense work, which will take up 6,000 square feet of exhibition space, a mediation on dreams, grief, war and the lives of birds, for the Sydney Biennial in 2008. Visitors walk through a stark maze of 98 black speakers, while a complex mix of music, sound effects and storytelling washes over them, catching them up in the middle of a nightmare.
It's a much darker, more political creation than the pair's best-known piece, Forty-Part Motet, says Crowston, inspired by Francisco de Goya's etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, from his series Los Caprichos.
Which brings us to the AGA's fourth grand opening blockbuster, an exhibit of 160 Goya etchings from both Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War, Goya's gruesome study of the vicious cruelties of the Peninsular War. The Spanish artist is sometimes called the last Old Master and the first modernist, and his etchings are so starkly contemporary, so fiercely political, you need to stop to remind yourself that they're some 200 years old.
Add the Goya etchings to the Karsh, the Degas and the Cardiff/ Bures Miller pieces, and you've got a jaw-dropping opening lineup. On top of that, there will be a new interactive children's gallery and a show of photographs of the gallery construction shot by edgy Toronto "industrial" photographer Edward Burtynsky.
The idea, says Hebert, was to create a program that balanced contemporary with historic art, accessible, family friendly exhibits with more challenging material, and which included works by Albertan, Canadian and international stars.
"The idea was to open with a bang, and how better than with these artists?" says Hebert, who started work at the gallery this week. "I don't know of a better exhibition space in this country. It is absolutely stunning. I've got the pinch myself, to be sure I'm not dreaming."
One thing we won't see a lot of in the gallery's first months will be borrowed paintings. Crowston says traditional paintings on canvas are the art works that are most vulnerable to environmental shock. The AGA will have to prove it can maintain the highest standards, she says, before major galleries and collectors will lend their paintings to show here.
Still, it promises to be a gala debut indeed. The trick now will be to see if the gallery can translate blockbuster shows into blockbuster attendance, if it can convince Edmontonians and tourists to make the gallery a major destination. The gallery is off to a fine start. And Crowston says the best is yet to come.
"We've got some great shows over the next two or three years that will really wow people.
[email protected]/Paulatics
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http://www.edmontonjournal.com/travel/Blockbuster+lineup+open+Edmonton+gallery/2158180/story.html
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