"Everything Under The Sun: In Memory of Andrew Gruft" Exhibit |
The “Everything Under the Sun: In Memory of
Andrew Gruft” Exhibit,
opened last April 15, 2022, was drawn from wide-ranging photos in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s (VAG) permanent collection.
It pays tribute to the late local collector Andrew Gruft (1937–2021) whose generosity and support, over
the past two decades, have been crucial to the development and radical shift of
the Gallery’s collection of photographs. Prior to that time, the VAG’s holdings
included little in the way of historical and modern photography. The exhibit runs until September 11, 2022.
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David (Stephen Waddell, 2017, silver gelatin print) |
Gruft’s Jewish family had
fled the Nazis in Poland in 1939, ending up in South Africa where Gruft grew up
and would go on to graduate in architecture from Cape Town University (before
working in architecture in Rio de Janeiro and Vancouver).
Kodak Three Point Reflection Guide (Christopher Williams, 2003, dye transfer print) |
For almost five decades,
Andrew Gruft played a vital role as collector, critic, patron and life force in
Vancouver’s art community. From 1976 to 1982, he and Claudia Beck, his partner,
ran NOVA, a gallery on West Fourth Avenue that was an important nexus for the
city’s artists, curators and collectors.
Flan Poles (Gabriel Orozco, 2000, azo dye print) |
The gallery mounted
exhibitions of work by well-known photographers (including William Henry Fox Talbot and Robert Frank) as well as exhibitions by then unknown Vancouver
artists such as Jeff Wall and Marian Penner Bancroft. Even after NOVA closed in
1982, Gruft and Beck continued to build an extensive and eclectic collection of
photographs and to actively support Vancouver artists.
Berlin, Fall of the Reichstag, May 2, silver gelatin print 1945 (Yevgeny Khaldei, 1945) |
Trolley - New Orleans (Robert Frank, 1955, silver gelatin print) |
Overnight, with the addition
of these works in 2004, it radically changed” the face of the VAG permanent
collection, giving it international significance for its photo-based art. Over
the following years, through regular donations of artwork, the pair’s
generosity endured. Eventually, the
permanent collection numbered around 700.
Cocks and Flowers (AA Bronson, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, 1976-77, instant dye process prints) |
As part of the Capture
Speaker Series, Grant Arnold (Vancouver Art Gallery’s Audain Curator of British
Columbia Art) and Sophie Hackett (Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery ofOntario) host an online conversation about works in the exhibit on April 26, from 6 to 7 PM.
London (Robert Frank, 1951, silver gelatin print) |
The wide-ranging collection of
the tightly curated exhibit’s historically serious photographs of iconic
battlefield and street images includes a silver gelatin print of Benjamin
Leeson’s 1894-96 portrait of a high-status Quatsino woman, Lady Warcas, and a large still from Ian Wallace’s hand-tinted video
The Summer Script, from 1974. There
are also funny, irreverent, and often subversive images such as two self-explanatory
1970s works - Larry Clark’s Couple
Shooting Up on a Bed and General Idea’s Union Jack-like polyptic Cocks and Flowers.
Toreo de Salon Todas Torrados (Oriol Maspons, 1958, silver gelatin print) |
The famous, iconic World War
II image Berlin, Fall of the Reichstag,
May 2, 1945, by Yevgeny Khaldei, depicts a Soviet soldier hoisting his
country’s hammer-and-sickle flag high atop the Reichstag, the rubble of Berlin
beneath him, smoke billowing in the background. The shot only became available
to the West after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The photo was staged for
propaganda purposes. For maximum effect,
smoke clouds were added after the fact and the man hoisting the flag also had
two watches on his arm removed in the printing process. That’s because they
were a sign of looting (bad P.R. for the Red Army), punishable by death at the
time.
Untitled (Jonah Samson, 2015) |
Trolley–New
Orleans 1955, by famed
Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, an image of white passengers seen through
the open windows in the front and Black passengers relegated to the back, is a
chilling depiction of Southern segregation in the middle of the last century. Shot
in the French Quarter, a white child at the midpoint rests her hand on a
moveable wooden board (that could be shifted backwards if there were no more
seats for white people on the bus) that divided the sections. The expression, in a Black passenger’s gaze,
is a haunting mix wistfulness, puzzlement and alienation. This image emblazons
the dust jacket of Frank’s seminal book, The
Americans.
Manual Labor (Evan Lee, 2008, single channel video) |
Toreo
de Salon todas torrados en el barrio del Poble Sec endonde nacio, from 1958, a perfectly composed,
time-capsule image by the late Spanish photojournalist Oriol Maspons, pictures
workers waving around makeshift capes, pretending to be matadors in a narrow
street in Barcelona. There are also two women watching, from high above, on a
wrought-iron balcony and tiny children stopping to look on the sidewalk.
Diego Rivera (Edward Weston, 1924, silver gelatin print) |
Untitled, rendered in 2015 by Cape Breton photo
artist Jonah Samson ( a rising talent now celebrated for retooling his vast
collection of eclectic archival photographs into absurd, ironic, and often
disturbing imagery) in rich Van Dyke Brownprint, features a woman grinning and
waving at her shadow self in negative.
“Everything Under the Sun: In Memory of Andrew
Gruft” Exhibit: 3/F, Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6Z 2H7, Canada. Open Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays,
Saturdays and Sundays, 10 AM – 5 PM, Tuesdays and Fridays, 12 noon to 8 PM.
Admission: $24.00 (adults), $20.00 (seniors), $18 (students), $6.50 (children,
6 – 12 years old) and free (children 5 years old and under). Tuesdays, from 5 – 9 PM are “donation nights”
(pay whatever you want or can afford). Coordinates: 49.282875°N 123.120464°W.
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