PROVENANCE
Mazelow Gallery, Toronto
Collection privée, Toronto

EXPOSITION
32e Biennale de Venise, 1964

2024 marks not only the 70th anniversary of the first exhibition by Painters 11, of which Town was a founding member, it also marks the centennial of Town’s birth, providing us the perfect vantage point from which to observe his place in Canadian Art history. Painter, printmaker, draftsman, author, and critic, Town’s centrality to Canadian art and culture in the 1950s and 1960s is difficult to overstate. Prolific and intensely collected both publicly and privately, his works are often boldly iconoclastic, intellectually confrontational, and technically virtuosic. Apart from his numerous Canadian exhibitions and retrospectives, his works were also included in international exhibitions held at the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian, Canada House Gallery in London, the Bienal de São Paulo, the Milan Triennale, and twice at the Venice Biennale. Fiercely loyal to a national and regional focus and practice, Town’s broad oeuvre forever impacted art in Canada.

At play in this work are elements of the meta, and even post-modernist qualities of Town’s art. While the Confrontation of the title could be between opposing types of forms, it could be interpreted as a conflict between different approaches to art itself. The silhouetted quasi-human and animal-like forms have a classical, even ancient feel, which algins them with the traditional processes of drawing and mark-making. In contrast, the floating, organic, patterned shapes on the right side of the composition have a much stronger presence of brushwork, painting, and modernity. Here, Town seems to set a stage for the endless battles between the old and the new in art and culture.

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