The gender- and genre-bending British musician David Bowie died yesterday at the age of 69. While the world mourns the passing of this legendary performer—who often crossed paths with contemporary art, as evinced by the V&A’s hugely popular 2013 exhibition, “David Bowie Is”—we at Canadian Art recall a small 2009 show at Toronto’s erstwhile Clark and Faria gallery, in which a number of Canadian artists paid tribute to him.
Here, a slideshow of many works from that show: Derek Liddington’s sketches of Bowie’s various hairstyles; a Douglas Coupland text work; Dave Dyment’s sound piece Fifteen Minute Fame, in which the Bowie/Lennon song is slowed down to its appropriate Warholian length; a Romas Astrauskas watercolour; Roy Arden’s Sunmachine from 1973; and Will Munro’s Circle of One (David Bowie) from 2005, here shown reflecting Munro’s 2010 memorial at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel. In addition, Arden has sent us his 2012 work What in the World, a collage that, in Arden’s words, “contains an image of Bowie and Iggy in a German train station.”
Rest in peace, Thin White Duke.
