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The exhibition In These Drawings My Hands Are Dreaming includes George Segal?s haunting Sophie VI.
Photograph by: Brian Merrett , MMFA
Drawing is like soccer in its minimal requirements: instead of an empty lot, a ball and a foot to move it around, you need only a piece of paper, a pencil and a hand to control it. Both the sport and the art make use of your head, inspire you to see beauty in their execution ? and are holding their own in an environment of extreme sports and digital graphics.
Drawing can take an artist to the furthest limits of conceptual and experimental forms, writes St?phane Aquin, curator of In These Drawings My Hands Are Dreaming, an exhibition of contemporary drawings at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
?(Drawing) can be integrated into performance, digital art, film and music,? Aquin writes.
?It can compete with the complexity of painting or the formats of sculpture and installation, blurring genres without losing its power to challenge.?
The exhibition includes George Segal?s haunting Sophie VI, a portrait in pastel and charcoal, and Annie Pootoogook?s Composition (Sleeping Man with Bible) in felt pen and wax pencil, one of her many portrayals of contemporary Inuit life.
It also includes some recent acquisitions, including Betty Goodwin?s Black Arms, a drawing that incorporates several media ? oil pastel, dry pastel, oil paint and charcoal ? to evoke something on the edge between dance and pain.
Peter Krausz?s Earth Song (Tribute to Yves Gaucher) uses horizontal lines to evoke in his landscape drawing the rhythm that Gaucher created in his abstract paintings, said Marie-Jos?e Daoust, a museum guide. But where Gaucher used minimal means in his colourful abstracts, Krausz?s landscape of blacks and greys more resembles the legacy of a strip mine.
Another MMFA exhibition in what the museum calls a ?springtime for drawing? is From the Hands of the Masters. The more than 65 drawings made between the 16th and 18th centuries come from a private Montreal collection, one that museum director Nathalie Bondil described as the best in Canada.
The drawings reveal artists at their most intimate, ?working out compositions, exploring ideas, recording sights and imagining others,? curator Hilliard Goldfarb writes in a catalogue produced for the exhibition. They range from rapid sketches to finished works.
Fran?ois Boucher?s Head of a Woman: La Coquette is a pastel portrait that captures the freshness of youthful beauty.
Goldfarb writes that Giulio Romano?s Funeral Pyre with an Eagle Surmounting a Female Corpse is a 16th-century drawing whose odd imagery may be explained as a design for an impresa ? an animal, plant or object used with a motto to symbolize an individual or family. Romano was a painter in the court of Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, whose impresa was an open-winged eagle. What the female corpse stands for is unknown.
From the Hands of the Masters: Unveiling Old Master Drawings from Canada?s Foremost Private Collection and In These Drawings My Hands Are Dreaming continue until July 7 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1380 Sherbrooke St. W. For more information, visit mbam.qc.ca.
Not that there is anything wrong with the electronic arts, whose best practitioners are familiar with art history and maybe even know their Boucher and Romano.
The artist-run Eastern Bloc centre is celebrating its fifth Sight & Sound digital arts festival until May 29. Thirty artists and theorists will show work and talk about issues that include the festival?s theme of the black market ? how does it work? How does it parallel the economic and technological systems of global markets?
A program of performances, installations, conferences and workshops will explore the act of ?hacking the network? to expose the mechanisms that are ?maintained by dominant economic and political power structures,? festival organizers promise.
The Sight & Sound festival continues until May 29 at Eastern Bloc, 7240 Clark St. For more information, visit sightandsoundfestival.ca or easternbloc.ca.
The MMFA has unveiled its plans for a fifth pavilion that will house its international collections, including the donation by Michal and Renata Hornstein of 75 works, which include a group of paintings by 17th-century Dutch and Flemish masters.
The consortium of Manon Asselin Architecte and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte Architectes won a competition for the design of a pavilion on Bishop St., just south of the Jean-No?l Desmarais Pavilion on Sherbrooke St.
Museum director Nathalie Bondil said the new Pavilion 5 will house its Old Masters collection, the Ben Weider Napoleonic collection and its ?modern art collection from Daumier to Picasso that is so popular with visitors.?
Pavilion 5 will also house the museum?s educational programs and provide a new entrance for groups and students on Bishop St., which will have enlarged sidewalks to accommodate busloads of students.
Meanwhile, the museum?s collections of world cultures, photography and design will move to new spaces in the other four pavilions, Bondil said.
Pavilion 5 is scheduled to open in time for Montreal?s 375th anniversary celebration in 2017. The province is financing the project and contributing $18.5 million. Eighty-five per cent of the funding will come from the private sector, which will also cover operating costs.
john.o.pohl@gmail.com
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