"Everything Under the Sun: in Memory of Andrew Gruft" Exhibit (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada)

 

"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)

 One of Capture Photography Festival’s featured exhibitions for 2022, the exhibit features a selection of almost four hundred historical, modern and contemporary photographs, by Eugène Atget, Anne Brigman, Karin Bubaš, Becky Cohen, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Oriol Maspons, Gabriel Orozco, Issei Suda and William Henry Fox Talbot, among others, donated to the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2004 by Gruft and Beck over the past eighteen years.

 

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.