New Exhibitions opening February 5
Fredericton, NB, January 29, 2015 – New exhibitions open February 5, 2015, launching the Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s winter season. The public is cordially invited to attend the opening reception at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Thursday, February 5, 2015 at 5 pm. Featured this season are two artists whose work highlights deeply introspective approaches to art.
Both painter John Clark and printmaker Dan Steeves are concerned with individual experience in a wider context: Steeves reflecting on pain, suffering, and healing at a personal level and a societal one; Clark contemplating how individuals fit into, and are affected by, a bigger, broader world, and where they find meaning in it.
A Sense of Place:
British-born artist John Clark’s career spanned great distances until his death in 1989: from England to Halifax, Nova Scotia to Lethbridge, Alberta. A gifted artist, writer, curator and university professor, Clark’s work is represented in major public gallery collections across Canada, including the National Gallery and the provincial galleries of Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.
A major retrospective exhibition, Touching the Sky: The Metaphysical Quest of John Clark draws work from the artist’s estate as well as public collections, including the Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s, and presents an overview of the artist’s work and career. “Clark was very attuned and sensitive to the mood, tone, coloration and themes pertinent to the places where he lived,” says curator Jeffrey Spalding. “He pursued an ever-evolving exploration. His subjects morph, transforming from faces into clocks into wheels into celestial orbs. Clark’s paintings position us firmly rooted on the ground, but gazing skyward and fathoming the invisible forces that shape our existence back down on the surface of the planet.”
A Sense of Pain:
Stark, black and white prints provide a vehicle for artist Dan Steeves’ examination of personal and historical suffering in the exhibition, Dan Steeves: The Memory of Pain. The exhibition continues this New Brunswick artist’s exploration of the theme of how good and evil, temptation and redemption, battle for the souls of the living.
The Memory of Pain is a look at an intensely personal trauma that afflicted the artist’s family, but it is also a bridge to a broader, historical consideration of suffering. “The prints comprising this exhibition are depictions of home and of the ruins of the Second World War Austrian slave labour and Jewish concentration camp at Mauthausen,” explains curator Tom Smart. “Steeves’ personal struggle and its lingering memories are points of departure for a compelling artistic exploration of an encounter with pain and suffering and its transformative, mortal aspects.”
These two exhibitions will run until May 17, and join two already in progress: Modern in Nature: Bruno Bobak’s Vancouver Years (1947-1960) and Ron Thom and the Allied Arts, which continue through March 1, 2015. The new exhibitions are supported by our funders, including the City of Fredericton and the Province of New Brunswick, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
For further information, please contact:
Jeremy Elder-Jubelin
Manager of Communication and Visitor Services
Phone: (506) 458-2039
Email: visitorservices@beaverbrookartgallery.org
The Beaverbrook Art Gallery enriches life through art.
La Galerie d’art Beaverbrook enrichit la vie par l’art.