CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. — The Confederation Centre Art Gallery is featuring a new exhibition entitled “In the Balance”in the Upper West Gallery until Sept. 22.
The collection show explores the tensions between form and concept, ideas and matter, making and thinking – selected from gallery’s permanent collection.
exhibition, curated by Pan Wendt, includes primarily modern paintings that carry a material quality.
“There is a long history in Western art of giving priority to design, to the mental picture, to drawing over colour, line over material, spirt over matter,” said Wendt.
In Renaissance Italy, where many ideas about art were first articulated, this manifested as two rival aesthetic approaches to paint, disegno (design) versus colore (colour).
In late 1960s, while the distinction of formal, conceptual and optical were at critical height, artists start to develop pieces based on materially grounded conception of the work of art.
“We tend to think of perception in terms of the spiritual, or a disembodied experience of form, separated from its material basis, but in fact we are led by touch and other non-visual senses. And thought is itself intertwined with the whole body,” said Wendt.
Later, the idea stage and the material process were granted equal influence in final product and the physical process of making was emphasized.
The exhibition include works from Ron Shuebrook, Harold Klunder, Aganetha Dyck, Ingrid Mary Percy and Lionel Stevenson. For more information, visit confederationcentre.com/gallery.
