THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA
Karen Colby-Stothart
Director, Exhibitions and Installations
Introduction
Exhibitions are the primary means through which the Gallery connects with its visiting public and with art museum networks around the world. The program presents dynamic, high quality projects across all periods of art history and is a premiere showcase for contemporary visual artists in Canada. Exhibitions allow us to present and see our own Collections in new contexts, provide interpretation and information. They can launch new artistic careers and celebrate established ones, and in many cases are the final presentation stage of important scholarly research and showcase the writing of art history itself. New acquisitions, original publications, technical discoveries and artistic productivity are fully interwoven with the research and production stages of most special exhibition projects. Many exhibitions then go on to presentations across Canada and internationally through our extensive traveling exhibitions program. Twenty to thirty National Gallery exhibitions are presented every year through a network of about 45 regularly participating Canadian art museums. Each year 250,000-450,000 visitors see the National Gallery’s Collections exhibited in small, mid-sized and major cities across Canada in this way. In the region of 500,000 visit exhibitions in Ottawa at the National Gallery of Canada itself.
Tonight I would like to first note two highlights from the 2007 program. Then I will give you a preview of five upcoming projects next year and mention some of our longer range projects taking place in 2011 and 2012.
Highlights of 2007
This summer, the Gallery presented Renoir’s Landscapes, organized in partnershipwith the National Gallery, London, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This was the ten-year sequel to our earlier extremely popular exhibition of Renoir’s Portraits presented in 1997. Both exhibitions assembled paintings borrowed from collectors and museums around the world in Ottawa for a rare presentation of over 65 paintings of the artists work. They also allowed the National Gallery of Canada to contribute important new scholarship to the field of Renoir research, organize symposia and publish an important exhibition catalogue in English and French editions.
As part of the Gallery’s commitment to presenting contemporary art from other cultures, the exhibition currently on view in our special exhibition galleries is Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography. In the last decade, artists in Africa have moved well beyond both African traditions and Western influences to explore new aesthetic territory. This exhibition, organized by the International Center for Photography in NYC, presents the work of 40 different artists from 12 African countries in a stunning presentation of contemporary photographic art practice across the African continent.
Highlights of the 2008 Program
Canadian contemporary artists are heavily featured both in our constantly rotating permanent collection gallery spaces and in the special exhibitions program.
In the New Year, Saskatchewan artist, Joe Fafard, will be the subject of a major career retrospective, organized in partnership with the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. The exhibition is currently on view in Regina and will open here in Ottawa in February. It will subsequently be toured through our traveling exhibition program to the McMichael Art Gallery in Ontario, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.
In the Shadow of the Midnight Sunis an exhibition of70 works by contemporaryCanadian Inuit artists and Sami artists from Norway, Sweden and Finland. The exhibition was organized by the Art Gallery of Hamilton and explores some of the affinities and contrasts between the practices of these two important circumpolar cultures.
At Shawinigan Space in Quebec, the Gallery will present Real Life, an exhibition of the work of two internationally renowned contemporary artists: London-based Australian hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck, and Israeli video and installations artist Guy Ben-Ner, who makes his home in Berlin. The works to be shown in the restored former aluminum smelter will create a narrative of the human condition and the issues that shape it – life and death, our need to live in community and our separation from the world around us. The exhibition, which includes recent major Gallery acquisitions, will also be offered to other Canadian galleries.
The summer exhibition for 2008 is The 1930’s: The Making of “The New Man,” organized by the National Gallery of Canada. This exhibition brings together over 200 artworks from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Pompidou Centre, the Guggenheim and over 70 other distinguished lending partners. In the 1930s, the idea of the “new man” or the “superman” spread through Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union and beyond. The exhibition will examine the link beween art and biology, as well as the emergence of the “new man,” in this disturbing decade. On view will be magnificent works by the some of the period’s greatest artists, including Europeans Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Vassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst and August Sander, and North Americans Grant Wood, Jackson Pollack, Walker Evans and Alex Colville.
In the Christmas and winter season the Gallery will present Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture, organized in collaboration with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition will explore the remarkable development of the sculptural portrait in early17th Century Rome. The National Gallery of Canada owns an extremely important marble sculpture bust, Pope Urban VIII, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini that will be an exhibition highlight. The opportunity to view works by the artistic giants of the Baroque era in proximity to one another will make clear the remarkable artistic innovations of the period and provide an extremely rare opportunity for study.
Long Range Projects
The Gallery works many years in advance, cultivating partnerships with both Canadian and International art museums in the building of its program. Complex logistics including loan negotiations with lenders worldwide, research, publication of exhibition catalogues, legal contracts, transport, insurance, and technical planning may require 3 to 5 years advance lead-time.
Upcoming projects on our long-range calendar from 2009 through 2012 include two highly anticipated exhibitions organized by the National Gallery of Canada that will contribute new scholarship to the field of the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque periods: From Raphael to the Carracci: The Art of Papal Rome (2009), and Caravaggio and his Followers (2011). The following year (2012) the Gallery is organizing a rare monographic exhibition on Vincent Van Gogh assembling over 50 paintings by the artist in a study of his fascination with the close up and the influence of Japanism on his work.
The contemporary program will include important career retrospectives of Carl Beam (2010) and a collaborative project with the Winnipeg Art Gallery on Wanda Koop (2011). It will also include a large-scale, survey exhibition featuring emerging Canadian artists in Caught in the Act: The Vieweras Performer(2009).
These exhibitions and many more will be presented at museums in Canada and abroad thanks to the traveling exhibition program.
I invite you to consult tour calendar of exhibitions in order that you do not miss our upcoming program.
Thank you.
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