Pacific, 1967
Alex Colville

Alex Colville at the AGO: A complicated man

Murray Whyte

Friday August 15 2014

In the art world, there are two words that never seem to meet: “Canadian” and “blockbuster,” unless you’re talking about the Group of Seven, and even then it’s touch and go.

Into this, we can now insert a notable exception: the sprawling Alex Colville retrospective the Art Gallery of Ontario is busily prepping for later this month. More than any other artist in Canada, Colville has a galvanizing, sea-to-shining-sea appeal. Maybe it’s his deep investment in repressed anxiety — a trait bred in our country’s bones — that strikes that particularly Canadian nerve, but whatever the case, one thing’s sure: when it opens in the gallery’s special exhibition space on Aug. 23, it will more than hold up its end on the ticket-sales front.

 

Family and Rainstorm, 1955
Alex Colville

AGO's Alex Colville exhibit aims to enlighten but manages to exhaust

JAMES ADAMS

PUBLISHED AUGUST 22, 2014

It’s usually a huge disappointment when a survey of a major artist fails to include a work or works that a viewer believes should be there. How authoritative and essential would a Tom Thomson retrospective be without The West Wind and The Jack Pine? Ditto a van Gogh exhibition minus The Starry Night, or a Manet sans Le déjeuner sur l’herbe from the Musée d’Orsay.

Alex Colville, Church and Horse (1964) (The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts/©A.C.Fine Art Inc.)

No one is going to complain about such absences in Alex Colville, an exhibition of paintings and studies by the man who, before his death last summer at 92, was Canada’s most famous living artist. Opening Saturday at the Art Gallery of Ontario for a run through Jan. 4, the show spans his entire career, includes more than 110 paintings culled from public and private collections across the country, and sprawls over several galleries in the Zacks Pavilion on the AGO’s second floor. The Toronto gallery hosted the first major retro of the artist 31 years ago, a two-month-long showcase that went on to tour other Canadian centres, as well as venues in Germany, China and Japan.

Alex Colville. Family and Rainstorm, 1955. On loan from the National Gallery of Canada. © A.C.Fine Art Inc. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Celebrating the Enduring Vision of Alex Colville

AGO's new exhibition of one of Canada's most prolific artists explores the roots of Colville's inspiration—and the inspiration he's been for others.

BY PETER GOFFIN

August 20, 2014

“Alex Colville“
Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas Street West)
August 23, 2014–January 4, 2015, closed on Mondays
$25 adult, $21.50 senior, $16.50 student, youth

Alex Colville’s paintings include some of the most recognizable works of Canadian art. Prints of his iconic Horse and Train and To Prince Edward Island hang in homes and classrooms and art shops around the world. And yet the Toronto-born artist, whose career spanned seven decades, is not often celebrated for the incredible influence he had on artists of many media.

Alex Colville / 1920-2013

Alex Colville

(1920 - 2013)

Alex Colville

Athletes, 1960

Artist and Car, 2008

Kiss with Honda, 1989

Obituaries / Alex Colville

Artist and Car, 2008
Alex Colville

Alex Colville obituary

Canadian artist whose experiences at Belsen cast a dark shadow over a lifetime's work

BIOGRAPHY OF ALEX COLVILLE

Michael McNay
1 August 2013

Alex Colville, who has died aged 92, took a degree in fine art in 1942, enlisted in the Canadian infantry, married the poet and painter Rhoda Wright, and in 1944 was deployed as a war artist. The following year, after the British had overrun Bergen-Belsen in north-western Germany, Colville went with the Canadian 3rd division into the concentration camp where 10,000 bodies lay in an open grave. He sat down and sketched the scene. This dark experience yielded a macabre and awful image for the Canadian war museum in Ottawa and marked his art at a deeper level for the rest of his life.

Alex Colville, Couple on Beach, 1957.
Casein tempera on Masonite, 73.4 x 96.4 cm.
Purchased 1959 National Gallery of Canada

Alex Colville: Love in a Cold Climate

Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto August 23 to January 4, 2015

BIOGRAPHY OF ALEX COLVILLE

DAVID BALZER
September 4, 2014

When he was living in Toronto, an American friend of mine brought some of his visiting family to the Art Gallery of Ontario’s permanent collection. They loved the Group of Sevens. Of the Lawren Harrises he said, “They’re so great, so… cartoonish.” My friend is a graphic designer, though perhaps not readily familiar with the Group’s predilection for design: the important influence of that (by turns equally “cartoonish”) Scandinavian painting show at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1913, which some of the Group visited, and of the Arts and Crafts movement, or that many of the Group, including Tom Thomson, A.Y. Jackson and J.E.H. MacDonald, had themselves worked as commercial designers and illustrators.