Greg Curnoe, Self-Portrait #4, 1992. Image: ccca.ca
New York and London are the twin centres of today’s international art world, but what about less-visible, off-the-map places, like Hamburg, Chicago or Winnipeg, the almost unbelievably creative geographical heart of this country?
(We saw Guy Maddin narrate his acclaimed, celebratory, idiosyncratic film, My Winnipeg, live last night in Toronto – click HERE to watch the trailer)
We shouldn’t neglect the regional – something that the late, great artist (and avid cyclist) Greg Curnoe clearly believed. In fact, he based his entire career on it. Based in London, Ontario and highly influential in the 1960s and 70s, Curnoe founded Region magazine in 1961, Region Gallery in 1962, and co-founded the Forest City Gallery, an artist-run centre in 1973. He also co-founded CARFAC, the “national voice of Canada’s visual artists” with Jack Chambers in 1968.
Greg Curnoe, “The Great Canadian”, 1965. Image: thielsengallery.com
Greg Curnoe, Mariposa T.T., 1979. Image: sfu.ca
Greg Curnoe, “A Canadian Patriot Worships…”, Oct. 25/26, 1986. Image: thielsengallery.com
The writer Robert Fulford has called him “a one-man revolution (who) affected the practice of art across Canada. His work’s beauty emerged not from aesthetic theory but from his commitment to reality.”
How relevant that sounds today, particularly when artists such as Maddin in Winnipeg, Dyan Marie in Toronto and many others celebrate and document their local community as part of their artistic practice.
We admire his colourful work because it’s both relevant and beautiful.
Greg Curnoe, America, May 31/June 30, 1989. Image: thielsengallery.com
Read Robert Fulford’s excellent piece on Curnoe HERE.
Work by Greg Curnoe is available from Thielsen galleries, London Ontario. Click HERE
VoCA thanks artist Paul Butler for bringing Greg Curnoe to our attention.
Andrea Carson writes on contemporary art, architecture and design...
13 comments ↓
since when is curnoe underrated? didn’t he have a solo show at the AGO not so many years ago?
would curnoe have applauded royal art lodge, et al.’s new york (market) appeal? From what i can remember reading he was suspicious of any canadian artist’s success down south. he also spoke very critically of Garry neil Kennedy’s hiring practices at NSCAD in the 60’s (too many americans). where would canadian art be without the legacy of the correspondence classes conducted by david askevold? what of NSCAD students’ early exposure to acconci, baldessari, graham?
wha…?
has voCa been living in a cave? we here at mark think so.
Artists qualify as ‘underrated’ if VoCA feels that they are less recognized than they should be - with local, national or international audiences….
And when it comes to Curnoe, maybe we’ve been in a cave, but we haven’t heard mention of him - at all - since we moved back from the U.K in 2003….
Well I can confirm I have been living in a cave so I welcome info like this. Love the self-portrait.
regardless of “ratings” it’s always great to see Curnoe’s works. he was lost to us far too soon. It would be great to have his voice with us now.
BTW I’m pretty sure his work is also available at Wynick/Tuck in Toronto…I’ve seen some beauties there.
Hard to imagine Curnoe making an”under-rated” list,but as Andrea notes she wouldn’t know his work relying on the past five years. Reading ‘Canadian Art’ gives the impression that Canadian artists disappear and are replaced every three months. Looking at my parents copies of the magazine ,Curnoe ,Joyce Wieland ,Yves Gaucher ,Jack Shadbolt ,Anne Kahane,Roy Kiyooka and many others recur in discussions ,reviews ,gallery ads , features over time,and without being confined to ‘Imaginary Homelands’. Rather than trying to undermine Curnoe’s work by calling him antiAmerican ,It would be more interesting to ask what Marcel Dzama would have drawn if he had been of draft age during the the Vietnam War,and what their reception and cost in New York then might have been. Part of NSCAD’s appeal to the list of artists noted was Canadian’s scepticism of the official US of the time.Maybe Dzama and Curnoe are closer than we think;the Lone Ranger was American ,Tonto Canadian.
we here at mark think that voca probably means “underexposed” rather than “underrated”. we are hard-pressed to find a museum that does not have a curnoe in their collection or a canadian art history text book that excludes him.
By the way, there’s an article on the perils of bike riding in the June issue of The Walrus, and the writer talks a lot about Curnoe’s death (hit by a truck while cycling). For an article supposedly about sports, it also talks a lot about the bike motifs in his art and the article is illustrated by a photograph of one of his large bike wheel paintings.
That would be this article:
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2008.06-cycling-in-toronto-bike-love-bill-reynolds/
I’d say underrated, underexposed and underknown.
Given that at the end of the ’60’s Curnoe may have been the best known contemporary artist in Canada, and that he was the first artist internationally to make paintings composed entirely of words, I’m surprised at how few know about him… including younger Canadian artists.
It’s almost criminal that he doesn’t appear in international surveys/book chapters of pop art, and that he is completely off the map internationally.
I like the Fulford line Andrea quoted, “His work’s beauty emerged not from aesthetic theory but from his commitment to reality” but this may be misleading because Curnoe was in fact very much aware of and responding to the theories of art in his times and before. (And in general Fulford the conservative is not exactly the most suitable commentator on Curnoe the anarchist).
The bicycle works were not well received by the Toronto critics in the ’70’s and despite the fact that they are most of what one finds on the internet about Curnoe, I think they are some of his weakest work. In general it’s a measure of his ‘understatus’ that he is so poorly represented on the internet - researching his work on the internet doesn’t get you very far.
A link to Sarah Milroy’s piece on Curnoe’s censored 1968 Dorval mural:
http://www.worldartcelebritiesjournal4.netfirms.com/dorval_mural.htm
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