Category: News Archive

Make Your Mark on Canada’s Biggest Photography Prize

The Grange Prize is Canada’s largest cash prize for photography and the only major Canadian art prize whose winner is chosen by a public vote. Each year, The Grange Prize Nominating Jury selects a shortlist of four extraordinary photographic artists – two from Canada and two from a partner country. Their work goes on view at the AGO and online at thegrangeprize.com, and then it’s up to you to decide which photographer should win the $50,000 prize. The 2011 shortlist was announced August 30, the same day that public voting begins.

The Grange Prize recognizes that contemporary photography includes a broad range of diverse practices and places no limitations on approach, subject matter, technology, or presentation. Artists are selected for excellence in the medium.

Here is the 2011 shortlist and the Jury’s Statement about their work:

Gauri Gill

Gauri Gill has recently emerged as one of India’s most significant young photographers. Gill’s practice is complex because it contains several seemingly discrete lines of pursuit. These include her more than a decade long study of marginalized communities in Rajasthan, of women from different generations and their often tentative encounter with modernity. She has also investigated and recorded issues around migrancy, and the decrepitude and change generated by an expanding city. Working in both black and white as well as colour, she seeks out the narratives of ordinary heroism within challenging environments. Gill’s work also addresses the twinned Indian identity markers of class and community as determinants of mobility and social behaviour. In these works there is irony, a rugged documentary spirit and a human concern over issues of survival.

Elaine Stocki

Elaine Stocki’s photographs began drawing critical attention when she was still an undergraduate student at the University of Manitoba. Now based in Brooklyn, she continues to hone a practice that challenges the expected limits of documentary photography by infusing its conventions with a constructed theatricality expressed in a voice uniquely her own. Working with subjects from a range of social standings – some of whom are strangers she meets by placing classified ads – Stocki creates compositions that explore the pressing issues of race, class and gender. While her themes are age-old, her language is remarkable in its seamless merging of reality and fantasy, order and disorder, humour and tragedy. Stocki roots herself in the history of photography, but has devised an approach to the medium which allows her to create images that are consistently unexpected and unconventional and always provocative.

Althea Thauberger

While Althea Thauberger’s practice defies strict definition by artistic medium, she has produced remarkable photographs, films and videos, among other things, over the course of her decade-long career. Driven by her interest in, and unique facility for, collaboration, the thread that connects all of her projects is her thoughtful engagement with groups of people – most often well-defined social enclaves – as her subjects. She works with these communities to develop performances that offer the members opportunities for self-exploration and self-definition. The works, which Thauberger produces to record the collaborations, are always extraordinarily striking documents that entice, engage and surprise her viewers.

Nandini Valli

One of the less historicized, recently celebrated strains in Indian photography is the performative photograph. Nandini Valli Muthiah has rapidly emerged as one of its foremost exponents. Nandini draws upon a long, established tradition in Indian popular art, the hyperrealist painted calendar poster of the gods. It is a widely recognized style, one that incorporates traditional painting and the painted photograph within a “mythologized” space. The element of subversion lies in the way in which the heroic figure is represented within normal or “modern” environments. A blue-bodied god in a hotel room, or young girls masquerading as Indira Gandhi at a fancy dress show, are comments on India’s perception of the heroic as much as on middle-class aspirations. Nandini Valli Muthiah approaches photography much like a cinema auteur, constructing every aspect of her frame. Her work shows a mature and ironic understanding of a shifting aesthetic field and value system in an increasingly globalizing India.

How to get involved:

Step One
Join us on the The Grange Prize Facebook page. We’ll give you access to ‘behind-the-scenes’ updates, exclusive contests and great content about this year’s nominees.

Step Two
Celebrate the arrival of The Grange Prize 2011 at an amazing free launch party at the AGO on Wednesday September 7.  The celebration will feature drinks, snacks and a set by DJ Jaime Sin in the AGO’s Walker Court, along with video interviews and live advocates highlighting each of the four shortlisted artists. You’ll also get a chance to meet the artists in person and view their work inside The Grange Prize 2011 Exhibition. Don’t forget to save the date.

Step Three
Cast your vote! Voting opens on August 30 and you can vote in person at the AGO or by visiting thegrangeprize.com. You have until October 29 to make your choice, and the artist who receives the most votes will receive the $50,000 prize at a gala reception at the AGO on November 1. Send me a reminder when voting opens
 

The Grange Prize is a unique partnership between the Art Gallery of Ontario and Aeroplan, The Grange Prize aims to engage the public in a vital discourse about the power and prevalence of photography in our world today through public exhibitions, voting and online dialogue.

“UNTITLED, 22 JULY 2010, 1″IPAD DRAWING© DAVID HOCKNEY

October 8, 2011 – January 1, 2012
Roloff Beny Gallery, Level 4

The Institute for Contemporary Culture presents the North American debut of this cutting-edge exhibition, which reveals David Hockney’s extraordinary use of this novel new artistic medium and its impact on shaping visual culture today. Hockney is one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, and Fresh Flowers is his first major show in Canada in over two decades. The exhibition features approximately 200 iPhone and iPad drawings displayed on 20 iPod Touches and 20 iPads.

Hockney began working with the iPhone in 2008.  Since then, he has created hundreds of finger-drawn images, ranging in subject matter from flowers and self-portraits to landscapes and still life. More than 20 Hockney drawings in the exhibition will feature playback animations, allowing viewers insight into the artist’s creative process as they view the works being drawn from start to finish. Fresh Flowers will also feature two films featuring Hockney working on an iPad, eight large-scale animated projections of recent iPad drawings, and a nine-minute triptych slide show with an additional 169 images.

Fresh Flowers marks the ROM’s first WiFi accessible exhibition, so visitors can share their experience online, in real time.

Project initiated by the Fondation Pierre Bergé / Yves Saint Laurent, Paris.
Charlie Scheips, Guest Curator. Ali Tayar, Exhibition Designer.

Deux femmes courant sur la plage (La Course) (Two Women Running on the Beach [The Race]), 1922 ,Gouache on plywood, 32.5 x 41.1 cm. Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979, MP78 Musée National Picasso, Paris(C) Succession Picasso, 2011 (C) RMN / Jean-Gilles Berizzi

In 2012, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) presents a major survey of masterworks by the most inventive and influential artist of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso. Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris features more than 150 highlights from the Musée’s unparalleled collection, including paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings. The exhibition will be on view at the AGO for just 17 weeks, from April 28 through August 26, 2012.

“Presenting Picasso masterpieces to Canadian audiences is a major accolade for our country and the Province of Ontario,” said President of the AGO Board of Trustees Tony Gagliano.  “The AGO is most proud to host these artworks and honoured to provide the opportunity to experience one of the art world’s greatest masters.”

The AGO is the sole Canadian and final venue on the tour, which includes stops in Madrid, Abu Dhabi, Tokyo, Helsinki, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Seattle, Richmond, San Francisco and Sydney.

“This is an extraordinary opportunity for Canadian audiences to view major works by Picasso, drawn from the world’s most comprehensive collection of his artwork,” says Matthew Teitelbaum, the AGO’s Michael and Sonja Koerner Director, and CEO. “With Abstract Expressionist New York, this fall’s Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde, and now Picasso, AGO members and visitors have the chance to take an incredible, year-long journey through some of the most thrilling and significant moments and masterpieces of 20^th-century art.”

Exhibited chronologically and covering virtually every phase of the modern master’s unceasingly radical and diverse career, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris features:

• The Death of Casagemas, one of the first works he created in Paris in 1901;
• Autoportrait (Self-Portrait), the iconic 1906 self-portrait;
• the 1904 Blue-period masterpiece Celestina (The Woman with One-Eye), and The Two Brothers, a 1906 work from his Rose period;
  
• landmark African-inspired artwork that led to the advent of Cubism, including studies for the 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Three Figures Beneath a Tree, 1907-08;
  
• examples of his genre-defining Analytic and Synthetic Cubism artworks, including the 1909-10 Sacré Coeur, 1911’s seminal Man with a Guitar and 1915’s Violin;
  
• Two Women Running on the Beach (The Race), a 1922 masterwork from his Neoclassical period, and 1925’s The Kiss, from his Surrealist period;
  
• a series of sculptures created during the Second World War, including 1942’s Bull’s Head, and two bronzes, 1943’s Death’s Head and 1950’s The Goat;
  
• The Bathers, the 1956 life-sized, six-piece figurative sculpture series created during a summer in Cannes; and
• The Matador, the famous self-portrait painted in 1970, three years before his death.

The exhibition also highlights Picasso’s depictions of his numerous muses and mistresses, including 1918’s Portrait of Olga in an Armchair, which features the Russian ballerina and Picasso’s first wife seated on a Spanish tapestry, the background left purposefully unfinished. French surrealist photographer Dora Maar, who inspired his 1937 “Weeping Woman” series, is also prominently featured, as is Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife and most-painted muse, depicted in the 1954 work Jacqueline with Crossed Hands.

Portrait of Dora Maar, 1937, oil on canvas, 92 x 65 cm, Musée National Picasso, Paris. Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979, MP158 (C) Succession Picasso, 2011 (C) RMN / Jean-Gilles Berizzi

“A dialogue about Picasso and his extraordinary career started at the AGO with the ground- breaking exhibition Picasso and Man in 1964,” says Anne Baldassari, chairman and chief curator of collections of the Musée National Picasso, Paris. “Now, the conversation continues with Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris, an exhibition presenting a magnificent collection of the artist’s work, giving Toronto audiences a true understanding of the artist’s inventive and transformative legacy.”

AGO members will be invited to an exclusive advance preview of Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris in the days leading up to the exhibition’s public opening. As with Abstract Expressionist New York: Masterpieces from The Museum of Modern Art and Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde: Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou, Paris, AGO Members receive free admission and VIP access to the exhibition, among other discounts and benefits. A 296-page catalogue has been published to accompany the exhibition. Edited by Anne Baldassari, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris includes 194 illustrations and will be available for purchase at shopAGO.

Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris is curated by Anne Baldassari, chairman and chief curator of collections of the Musée National Picasso, Paris. Elizabeth Smith, the AGO’s executive director of curatorial affairs, will oversee the exhibition’s installation at the AGO. The exhibition is co-organized by the Musée National Picasso, Paris and the Art Gallery of Ontario.