RON KOSTYNIUK

Calgary artist Ron Kostyniuk has been making and exhibiting architecture-inspired relief structures since the 1960s.

A relief sculpture by Ron Kostyniuk. Image: Courtesy of the artist.

Kostyniuk was born in Wakaw, Saskatchewan in 1941. He was educated at the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Alberta and the University of Wisconsin, receiving degrees in education, fine art and science.

He has shown extensively outside of Canada and his work is in over 40 public collections. Kostyniuk is currently a faculty member in the Department of Art at the University of Calgary.

Ron Kostyniuk, Anthropormorphic Architecture. Image: axisart.ca

Henri Matisse, The Snail, 1953. Image: tate.org.uk

“Science was a natural lead in to my interest in morphological arrangements,” he says. “My work with architecture grows from my fascination with geometry and structural formations in nature.”

Throughout his career, Kostyniuk has developed his various interests into a visual language that harks back to early painters like the Impressionists who were concerned with separating colour from a realistic representation of an object.

Ron Kostyniuk, Tilt. Image: axisart.ca

Most recently, Kostyniuk has been working on his Saskatchewan Road Map series, in which brightly coloured elevator shapes are shown divided and rebuilt, often in groups. For the artist, the series is “entirely devoted to emphasizing the grain elevator in its cultural role, its structural impact on the landscape and addressing the demise of this culturally and architecturally significant beacon.”

In Dying Embers 1 (1998), four incomplete rows of tightly colonnaded elevators evoke the gradually disappearing structures, both from the landscape and from memory.

Kostyniuk offers a bittersweet reflection: “Although the total demise of the elevator as a living prairie symbol is certain…I have given it a new life – a visual song of remembrance to be celebrated in art.”

Ron Kostyniuk, Saskatchewan Road Map. Image: axisart.ca

Kostyniuk is represented by Axis Contemporary Art, Calgary.

Click HERE for the gallery website.