Robert Wiens made his name in the 1980s as a postmodern sculptor of monumental fragments, but for more than a decade he has shifted the terms of his interest in fragmentation by making large-scale, meticulous watercolours showing closely cropped trunks and limbs of tree species such as white and red pine from Ontario’s old-growth forests. In his new show, Wiens extends his White Pine series with four new watercolour paintings and also presents a constructed drawing of the trunk and branches of a single butternut tree. As always, the illusionist detail in Wiens’s watercolours is arresting. His realism, however, is not a style choice so much as moral and ethical stance: a provocation to see the fragments as part of a large whole in need of conservation. (137 Tecumseth St, Toronto ON)
