CANADIAN ART EXHIBITION

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32676, 4 August 1971, Page 9

CANADIAN ART EXHIBITION

An exhibition of “Art from Canada’s West Coast” is bein exhibited at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery. The exhibition has been arranged by the Vancouver Art Gallery in conjunction with the National Art Gallery of New Zealand, with financial assistance from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council and the Canadian High Commission in New Zealand. In the introduction to the catalogue, it is explained that the size limitation imposed by air freight has meant the exclusion of work by some excellent artists, while others, whose work is included in the exhibition, apparently are not seen at their best on the small scale by which they are represented. The exhibition as it has arrived in Christchurch certainly is not very exciting.

Twelve of the exhibits are silk-screen prints, the most striking of which is an untitled, brightly-coloured, minimal work by Bodo Pfeir, a German-bom immigrant to

Canada. A psychedelic airbrush drawing, “Initiates of the All Over,” by Richard Turner, technically is impressive. but the general tenor of the show is one of cynicism, cynicism with art as well as life. “Ball and Chain,” by D’Arcy Henderson is one of several unsubtle comments on the boredom of suburbia, but Gathie Falk’s glazed-earthen-ware sculpture “Fourteen Rotten Apples,” perhaps expresses the mood of the exhibition best. She is known as “Vancouver’s Empress of Funk.”

It is stated in the catalogue that many of the. artists represented in the exhibition since have moved on to other modes of expression. Several indeed are said to have abandoned the manufacture of original hand-made objects altogether—not a new concept but a logical direction when the minimal has nowhere left to go. The exhibition will remain on view until August 10. —G. T. M.