Well, this is pretty cool

An elderly electrician in Paris has come and and said he owns a few hundred never-before-seen works by Pablo Picasso. Apparently, he did security alarm wiring at Picasso's French homes and got pretty chummy with him. Pretty savvy of the guy to take artwork over cash payment; hard to think a little electrical work would pay off to the tune of $80 million, which is what the early guess on the value of the works is pegged at. It's yet to be authenticated. From Bloomberg:

"A French electrician who claims to own 271 unknown works by Pablo Picasso, valued at $80 million, has sent a shock wave throughout the country’s legal and artistic community, according to the Paris daily newspaper Liberation.

The paper says Pierre Le Guennec, who installed burglar alarm systems at Picasso’s numerous residences in France before the artist died in 1973, approached the artist’s estate in September in an attempt to get the canvases authenticated by Picasso’s son, Claude Picasso."

My monthly "I'm sorry" feature

But I am. Really. No more or less than usual, but man, this digital space gets about as much love from me these days as, well ... I can't even bother to come up with a simile. That's how much.

It's likely because I've had my hands pretty full with the ol' paper the past few weeks. I said I'd keep you posted on what's going on in the dead tree realm, so here goes: November, in no particular order:

Some storefronts, which confluenced (I just made that up!) this month enough for me to write abotu them.

Daniel Barrow's show at Jessica Bradley (with lousy pics, alas);

Some earnest blather about why splashy visual arts prizes are just what our overly-modest culture needs;

Touchy stuff around the AGO's Maharaja show;

Brief bit on Barrow winning the Sobey Prize in Montreal, which I was lucky to attend;

Another smallish bit about auctions;

A Sobey preview, with odds;

A review of Pae White's Material Mutters at the Power Plant;

A surprisingly (particularly to me) gushy review fo Eric Fischl at Barbara Edwards Contemporary;

A brief chat with John Massey about his recent body of work, Apres Le Mepris;

My take on the Gardiner's Breaking Boundaries (short version: half good);

A few words rolled into a review of the National Gallery touching down in Toronto semi-permanently this month.

So those were my last two weeks. How were yours?

Picture: Joy Walker's "Positively No Self-Loathing," currently installed at Type Books on Queen St. W.

 

 

Doris McCarthy passes away at 100

You may already know that Doris McCarthy, one of the country's best-loved painters (and one of mine) died today at 100. Her family issued the following statement:

"Doris died peacefully at home, the home she lovingly called Fool's Paradise, which she bought and built in 1939, where she chose to spend her last days surrounded by nature, art, friends and family," Beth McCarthy, her great niece, said.

As most of us know, Fool's Paradise had always been intended by McCarthy to become an arts education centre on her death, cementing her legacy as a teacher -- she taught art at Central Tech in Toronto for decades -- and preserving her private nature reserve on the Scarborough Bluffs as an enduring source of inspiration for generations to come. 

I never had the chance to meet Doris, though I spent a lot of time with the wondrous, sprawling show of her semi-abstract "hard-edged" paintings that showed both at the U of T Art Centre and at the Doris McCarthy Gallery at U of T Scarborough this past summer. They were incredible things, and demonstrative of the experimental free spirit she always was in an at-times staid Canadian art landscape (no pun intended) of the 50s and 60s. She'll be missed.

Photo by Colin McConnell, Toronto Star, 2000

It's Barrow

Yup - Daniel Barow is your 2010 Sobey Art Award winner! Winnipeg's own, Barrow lives in Montreal now, where the award was presented about 20 seconds ago. Last night, he presented a stirring performance of his remarkably intricate, low-tech high-touch piece, Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry, about a failed-artist-turned-garbage man struggling to find resolution in his disconnected, lonely world. Heartbreakingly gorgeous. Congrats to him.

Sobey run-up: This week

It's the moment you've all been waiting for -- the $70K Sobey Prize gets awarded on Thursday in Montreal, and I'll be there to savour one artist's thrill of victory, and the other four's agony of defeat (which is generally more savoury anyway,  or is it just me?) Just kiddin' -- it must be pretty painful to be standing so close that you can touch the jackpot (the winner gets $50K, with $5k to each runner-up), only to be deflated in the most public of ways.

Cruel though such events may be for the final five, it's doubtless been a boon to Canadian art in general. The Sobey, with a significant enough purse to attract international look-sees, has been a key profile-raiser for young(ish) Canadian artists since it was founded 7 years ago, and while its visibility hasn't exactly reached Turner Prize proportions (no-one does outrage better than the Brits, though one could argue the Sobey, in recent years, has yielded better art) it's acheived its goal of pushing Canadian art more to the centre of our cultural conversation. Between the Giller, Polaris and the Sobey, we've got ourselves something to talk about that's not even slightly tokenistic, and entirely ours. How about that? 

Anyway, my point was simply to say that you needn't head off to Montreal to get a taste of most of the Sobey finalists' work; the Golden Horseshoe has been a veritable Sobey cornucopia in recent months, with our own Ontario rep Brendan Fernandes' Until We Fearless at the Art Gallery of Hamilton until last month, B.C. nominee Brendan Tang at the Gardiner Museum (alongside last year's Ontario rep Shary Boyle) until January. Meanwhile, at Jessica Bradley's modest-sized shop on Dundas West, odds-on favourites Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, representing the East Coast, had been showing a new video work -- forbidden love between primates -- alongside a selection of comically creepy installations -- lots of cats in terrariums until this past Saturday; the gallery's now being re-fitted with work by Prairies-rep Daniel Barrow, opening Saturday Nov. 20.

The only one missing, then, is Quebec's Patrick Bernatchez, whose chilly, otherworldy video installations have as good a crack as anyone not name Vey Duke or Battersby. Stay tuned.

Image of Fernandes at Until We Fearless, Art Gallery of Hamilton, July 2010.

Power Plant appoints new head curator

It's been a newsy week so far in Toronto art land, what with the National Gallery and MOCCA partnering up for three years, the AGO giving a first glimpse of its Maharaja show, and the, not to be outdone, the Power Plant announcing the much-anticipated replacement for curator Helena Reckitt. It's Melanie O'Brian (photo swiped from Facebook profile), who makes the jog to the centre of the universe from way out in Vancouver, where she was director and curator of Artspeak, one of the city's prominent artist-run centres, for the past six years. Her official title here is Curator of Programs.

The announcement ends several months of speculation (and worrying) by the local art community, who were wondering how far and wide the gallery might draw from for Reckitt's position; some of those concerns will surely be assuaged with the appointment of O'Brian, whose integration in the Vancouver artist-run centre scene -- not to mention her connections with that city's star-studded globe-trotting talent pool -- keeps things as they should be: homegrown and international all at once. Welcome to her.

 

News! MOCCA and NGC announce three-year partnership

Which is pretty exciting, when you think of MOCCA's severely limited resources, and the National Gallery's more expansive boundaries. What it means, essentially, is that MOCCA director David Liss gets to partner up with the NGC's Josee Drouin-Brisebois for a series of pocket-sized exhibitons in MOCCA's project room, drawing from the National Gallery's humongous, and excellent, contemporary Canadian collection.

Pretty sweet for the Toronto audience, which gets tailor-made a bunch of small-but-mighty glimpses of the NGC's riches without having to trek up to Ottawa which, if you're like me -- and if you're even slightly Torontonian, how could you not be? -- ranks right up there Toledo and Cleveland among my least-favourite cities to visit.

It's always been a quiet shame that the NGC's offerings are parked way up there, just far enough away to  feel out of reach, andwhile this hardly brings the full depth of the collections to our doorstep, it's a start, and something for us to get excited about.

The partnership kicked off this morning with reamrks by NGC director Mayer and Liss (right), and the surprise openng of Adams|Demand|Farmer, a tidy little show of the work of (respectively) Kim,  Thomas and Geoffrey that crackled with possibility. It just felt different somehow. In a good way.

Above: Thomas Demand's Space Simulator, 2003

 

$50K Grange Prize goes to Kristan Horton!

In an awards ceremony about five minutes ago at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Grange Prize was awarded to Toronto's Kristan Horton. I told you so, didn't I? Not that the other candidates weren't worthy -- this is probably the most interesting field in the Prize's short three-year history -- but there was  something about Horton's practice that set him apart. His extraordinary compulsion -- he'd agree that's the right word, I think --to dismantle and rebuild the for-granted wash of banal consumer objects and images never fails to confound in the most beguiling ways; his work manages a deft balancing act between intellectual complexity and frank, visceral and often hilarious engagement that's not often seen, and I congratulate him on his well-deserved reward. 

We also owe some thanks to the AGO's selection committee, I think, who brought  work by Leslie Hewitt and Josh Brand to Toronto for the first time, and Moyra Davey for the first in a long time; they were names I knew but whose work, for me, was only passingly familiar. I'm glad that's no longer the case; all have a revelatory, uniquely individual personal practice -- not easy to accomplish in the surfeit of photo-based work these days. Congrats to all.

Grange Prize 2010: And the winner is ..

... not to be announced until 7.30 PM tonight. Watch this space. I'll let you know the second it happens, OK?

Whoosh -- and it was over: Art Fair 2010

Hi there. It's been a while. You'll have to forgive me -- I took a couple of weeks off somewhat abruptly, but we can blame it on my son, who went and got born on Oct. 17. The nerve!

Anyway, on my path back to something resembling normalcy, I managed to catch the tail end of the the Toronto International Art Fair yesterday (bleary-eyed from sleep deprivation as I may have been) and have to say I was mildly impressed. This thing has come a long, long way in the past decade or so, and while it's virtually impossible to get past the impression that this thing is basically a trade show that features art instead of power tools or refrigerators -- because it is -- it's developed an self-consciously clever edge that leavens that inevitable fluorescent-lit cringe with some appropriately cheeky mischief.

Mostly I'm thinking of Jeremy Laing's clever installation "Everything Must Go!", the fashion designer's Honest Ed's-inspired discount bin of art works by such local luminaries as Luis Jacob, Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, An Te Liu and General Idea, for heaven's sake. Think of it as an art fair within the Art Fair, I guess, checking the generally genteel decorum of the market in place of an ultimately more honest hucksterism of what is, in the end, a high-end luxury goods industry. Cool.

Anyway, another part of my mild positivity was simply the quality of the work on display, particularly from the locals. MKG127 had a lovely array of work, big and small, from Ken Nicol, Roula Partheniou and Liu (who had a piece, a huge neon "Ennui Blanc," acquired by the AGO); Jessica Bradley, among her usual stable a show-stopper of a Shary Boyle miniature porcelain, Green Monster, she had to be holding out for just this occasion; Clark & Faria, with a handful of brand-spanking new Mark Lewis videos (at least one of them, an aerial view of a medieval fort in Italy, a jaw-dropper); Katherie Mulherin, whose wee suite of four tiny Mike Bayne paintings were also acquired by the AGO; and Barbara Edwards Contemporary, who gamely shlepped a couple of spectacular $100K Eric Fischl watercolours down to the convention centre for the occasion.

In short, in my brief meander, I had lots of fun.