Gallery Hop: Free gallery talk
Saturday September 18, 2 pm
Canadian Art editor Richard Rhodes in conversation with Power Plant curator Reid Shier

The Monte Clark Gallery Toronto is pleased to announce Reciprocal Influences , an exhibition of photographs and paintings by contemporary artists influenced by the intertwining histories of these two mediums.

In his essay from the exhibition Before Photography, Peter Galassi explains how early photographers reacted to the precedent set by the history of painting. No longer able to follow the established painterly rules of perspective, the camera, by its nature a tool of perfect perspective, allowed the artist to simply take the picture without being able to compose it.

Photography was born against the background of painting; the two exist in symbiotic relation to one another and today many photographers are looking back to the origins of the medium in order to extend its relevance. As photography has evolved from early work emulating painterly composition toward a representation of truth, abstraction and the political and social concerns of the documentary, we can now discern a respect for the painterly within much photographic practice and vice versa, as in the work of Gerhard Richter and Jeff Wall for whom historical precedents are of prime importance.

Some artists base their work in the documentary style, capturing reality at a particular moment with an eye to painterly construction uniting the instantaneous nature of photography with careful composition. Others approach the relationship between the two media through a third; Mark Lewis uses film to illustrate his interest in painting’s depiction of time’s passing. His location photographs function as documentation from which his films develop while they also exemplify his particular interest in iconic painterly images: landscapes, gardens. Anna Hunt’s photorealist embroidery reproduces 17 th century Dutch still-life painting and modernist images, highlighting the reproductive nature of the photograph in a space between real life and her careful, restorative artworks.

Today’s artists are acutely aware of and often inspired by photography, particularly painters for whom photography functions as a starting point. As the 2001 exhibition Painting on the Move made clear, younger painters are composing images through the filter of the photographic eye, ‘thinking in terms of the framework and constants of the painted picture, (defining) its limits and parameters with rigorous precision.’ It is not uncommon for painters like Holger Kalberg to emphasize subjective elements in their work such as image, material, colour, light, depth etc. Working from photographs, these artists have developed a perspective that exists because photography, like painting before it, has determined the way in which we view the world.

The Monte Clark Gallery, with spaces in Toronto and Vancouver represents leading Canadian and international contemporary artists including Roy Arden, Graham Gillmore, Anna Hunt and Scott McFarland.

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Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday10:00am to 6:00pm. Sunday 12:00 to 5:30 pm

Monte Clark Gallery

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