Islamic Treasure House: The Aga Khan Museum
John Bentley Mays looks at the about-to-open Toronto museum dedicated to historic and contemporary Islamic arts, unique in North America.
Young & Giroux Prove Ambivalent About Canada’s Modernization in Latest Work
A feature from the Fall 2012 issue of Canadian Art
An Te Liu: Modern Man
Toronto’s An Te Liu is internationally regarded for bridging art and architecture. As critic John Bentley Mays writes in this feature from our summer issue, his oeuvre also tells a tale about linked childhoods—namely, Liu’s and modernism’s.
Letter from Venice: Of Art and Its Publics
“Art cannot change the world,” critic John Bentley Mays writes in a letter from the Venice Biennale. But it can, he says, nourish many styles of engagement with the world. Here, Mays reports on the manifold modes of this Biennale—and of its visitors.
Extreme Painting
Over the last few years, a new manner of figurative painting—visceral, knowingly banal or aggressively two-fisted, deeply ambivalent about the lightness of the virtual and hostile to the opinion that figurative painting is dead—has emerged in galleries from Toronto and Montreal to New York, Berlin and beyond.
Days of the Dead
Jack Burman's photographs honour the living by telling the truth about death
Walter Redinger: Ghost Ship
No ideas but in things, wrote the American poet William Carlos Williams in 1944. He did not know Walter Redinger, who came of creative age a couple of decades later in London, Ontario, and in Toronto. But in writing that terse line—a controversial proposition about reality, a summary manifesto about art, a world view in five words—Williams could have been prophesying Redinger’s art, which his words perfectly characterize.
Karin Davie: From a Different Place
The exuberant abstraction of the Canadian-born artist Karin Davie took me by surprise last spring in Buffalo, where I was intent on other errands.
Remembering Agnes Martin 1912–2004
During the long and successful career that ended with her death in December, the Canadian-born artist Agnes Martin was variously called "the ascetic high priestess of Minimalist painting," a "mystic," a creator of "visual epiphanies." Her paintings were likened to prayers.
A conversation with Claude Gosselin
La Biennale de Montréal's mastermind Claude Gosselin speaks frankly on the state of art in Quebec ... Fall 2004
