Ian Wallace

Nicole Klagsbrun will present new work by the Canadian artist IAN WALLACE. The exhibition will open February 1 to the 20. A reception for the artist will be held at the gallery on Saturday February 1 from 6-8 PM.

Since the early 1970’s Ian Wallace used photography to formulate a critique of Western culture and modernist painting. Based in Vancouver, he and a small group including Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham among others, experimented with photography using its its inherent narrative structure as. Means to construct semiotic interpretations of metropolitan life. In doing so, he became a seminal figure in the use of photography and language as a conceptual strategy which continues to influence contemporary art into the nineties. His use of linguistic structure to create images which involve the viewer in a participatory experience in order to create meaning has been used by younger artists in attempts to deconstruct and analyze contemporary culture.

In these pieces large format colour photographs are laminated onto canvas and set against a field of paint. The photographs which represent the real are framed by paint and placed in a dialogue engaging the concepts of meaning in art, the value of art as mediator between idea and audience or a as bearer of information even as a critique. This juxtaposition of photograph and paint within a single piece raises the old question of the relationships between the two. Yet Wallace poses them in a context where neither deniers the other legitimacy, rather an interesting literal paradox develops. The photographic illusion of the real is heightened by its placement between the actual material reality of the painted areas of the canvas. Thus Wallace plays on the conflict between two languages of modernity in art: abstract painting and the aesthetics of high modernism; and the vernacular realism of photography with its ability to reveal and critique the everyday.

Ian Wallace

Nicole Klagsbrun is pleased to announce the opening of the first one-person exhibition in the gallery of IAN WALLACE on Thursday, April 5, with a reception for the artist from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition will continue at the gallery through April 28, 1990.

After some early experiments with monochrome painting, Ian Wallace has been using photograph as a conceptual art form since the late 60s. His earliest work is based upon a documentary mode, to be followed by sequential photographic murals influenced by cinematic and performance models in the mid-70s, as in “An Attack on Literature” (1975).

Since 1980, Wallace has been combining monochrome painting with photographic murals in works that feature thematic locations of subject-content: “In the Street” represents people in the public space of the city, “In the Museum”, a place of meditation between the public and private sphere, and “In the Studio”, a private place of production.

“As photomural laminated on canvas these works inscribe the photographic reliant of everyday life across the empty field of monochrome painting. The themes reflect on subject matter s that erupts from the everyday reality represented by photography, through a variety of open-ended and on-going series. Each of these servers carry their own relation to the problematic of form and context that comes out of the interaction between photographic images and painterly spaces where the particularity of temporal presence is framed by the materialised idea of art.” (Ian Wallace).

Born in 1943, Ian Wallace lives and works in Canada. He has had exhibitions, at the Stagegalerie in the Stuttgart, at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt, at the Maison de la Culture in Saint-Etienne. He is presently preparing a travelling exhibition, “The Idea of the University” in various universities galleries in Canada.