Governor General's Award winners in visual arts announced

And they are: 

Jana Sterbak, she of the infamous meat dress (way, way back in 1987; nothing else Lady Gaga does is original, how could this be any different?); Toronto recipients are photographer Geoffrey James, whose images of parks and cityscapes in Paris and his hometown, among others, have won him widespread acclaim, and abstract painter Ron Martin; Vancouver performance artist Margaret Dragu; Halifax video artist Jan Peacock; and Waterloo sculptor Royden Rabionowitch. Diana Nemiroff, the former National Gallery curator who organized Sterbak’s 1991 show “States of Being” won the “outstanding contribution award, while the Saidye Bronfman Award for crafts was won by Calgary goldsmith Charles Lewton-Brain. 

Congrats to all. 

 

Gerhard Richter in Toronto, in film and on canvas

Speaking of the Reel Artists festival, tonight, you can go see a film about German painting giant Gerhard Richter at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, but first, why don't you head over to the AGO to see his work in person? Culling some extraordinary works from the permanent collection, the gallery has assembled Shift, a selection of outstanding pieces from 1917 to 1971, a period, as the gallery puts it, "of great change." Change? Over 50-plus years? You don't say. However arbitrary the frame, though, the work is strong enough to leave anyone agog, as is the staging: Deep charcoal walls, low light cast a sombre tone over the show, and your eyes are magnetically drawn through the shroud to Richter's 1966 work "Helga Matura," one of his early pieces experimenting with the imperfect visual resonance between painting and photography, and one of his signature works painted from newspaper photographs of murder victims. It is haunting, visceral magic and virtuosic painting; the chances to see the work are all too rare, so don't squander this one and go.

The blogger is present

It may have escaped your notice, but I've been away for the last little while. I've come back and hit the ground running, though, having had the great fortune to sit down with Marina Abramovic for about an hour this morning. The story (hurried, too hurried) will be in the paper tomorrow, but in the meantime, I have to say this is one of the best experiences I've had on the job since, well, I don't know when. I think I may be an acolyte, try as I might to resist. Abramovic has that effect, I hear. 

In any case, she's in town for the Reel Artists Film Festival  with "The Artist Is Present," a documentary about her exhibition, and piece, of the same name that became a sensation at MoMA a couple of years ago. The fancy people gala is tomorrow night (Wednesday) but it re-screens on Sunday. It's a great film, in my humble opinion, so see it if you can. If you can't, don't worry; with the accolades it's receiving, it'll be released in theatres before long.

 Photo: Keith Beaty/Toronto Star

Stephen Andrews at Trump tower

I was wandering past the not-quite-open Trump tower in downtown Toronto this afternoon when I was taken by a spectral presence in the driveway -- an oblique, flesh-toned mush of randomly-sized ceramic tile, that, when you squinted just right, looked like a giant crowd scene, as seen through a gauzy scrim.

Sound familiar? I thought so too, so I went and asked the concierge, and sure enough, it was a commission by Toronto painter Stephen Andrews, for whom such indistinct crowds have recently been a favourite visual trope (though usually in paint; tile's a little more friendly to outside air, I imagine, and frankly, provided a field of visual interest that made the piece just mysterious enough that I wasn't 100% sure it was Andrews. It was a nice little revelation.)

Anyway, with the Andrews piece at Trump and James Turrell's glowing panels across the street at the Bay Adelaide Centre, Toronto is finally getting its Section 37 money's worth (see item 5.5). Better way, way late than never, I guess. 

Photo: My lousy iPhone

Everything's opening: MOCCA winter exhibtions this Saturday

MOCCA comes out of hibernation this weekend (it's been closed since the end of December) with a pair of shows: Tasman Richardson's Necropolis, an epic videodrome on the culture of death and, in maybe a necessary restoration of equilibrium, a show of landscape works in the National Gallery of Canada's pocket gallery on MOCCA premises.

I don't know much about the former just yet, but the latter, called Spectral Landscape, offers an intriguing slate of counter-intuitive groupings of such artists as photographer Sarah Anne Johnson and painters Tim Gardiner and Peter Doig. One thing they have in common, of course, are their unique, personal and thoroughly contemporary takes on the classical notion of representational landscapes, which capture a world quietly but insidiously transformed by human presence.

Such subtleties aside, there's also the marquee draw in Doig, whose paintings have blown through the roof at auction in recent years, offering both the chance to quietly contemplate earthly transformation, and an opportunity to gawk at an A-level multi-million dollar international superstar. Necropolis and Spectral Landscape open Saturday, Feb. 4 at 2 pm at MOCCA

Image: Big Sur, Peter Doig, 2001

Mike Kelley is dead; likely suicide

Gagosian Gallery has confirmed that Mike Kelley, one of the true giants of his generation, is dead. ARTINFO is reporting it was a suicide, but this is so far unconfirmed. He was 58. 

It's hard to know where to begin with Kelley's ouevre, which spanned the gamut from the viscerally grotesque to the more-than-occaisionally beautiful. In reviewing his 1993 survey at the Whitney, Times critic Roberta Smith observed that Kelly's work was "eccentric, obsessive, completely uninhibited and mind-bogglingly diverse."

That being the case, there's not much time or space for me to touch on it here, other than to say that Kelley's devotion to punk rock provided me with one of my earliest entry points to the visceral confusions of the contemporary art world. A native Detroiter, he was a co-founding member of the art-punk band Destroy All Monsters; his design of the aptly-named 1992 Sonic Youth album Dirty, with images of stuffed animals being defiled in the most gleefully dark ways, remains a signpost in my formative understanding of art in general. Sorry to see him gone so soon.