John Fox Refiguration
Invited Curator:Sandra Paikowsky
Vernissage:Thursday April 29 at 6 pm
Exhibition: April 30 to Mai 22, 2010
Curator’s Talk: Thursday, May 6 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition John Fox / Refiguration, which explores the artist’s return to representation in the mid 1980s after fifteen years of painting non-figurative images. The exhibition is curated by Sandra Paikowsky, well- known art historian and the artist’s partner of over thirty years.
John Fox / Refiguration celebrates and pays tribute to a remarkable painter, mentor and friend to so many artists in the Montreal community. The McClure Gallery exhibition offers a generous and telling selection of Fox’s late work: nine large oil paintings, fifteen pochades, twenty drawings and twenty-one watercolours. These recent works show traces of the figurative motifs from his early career but also bear witness to the artist’s new approach to the themes of places and people. Fox uses colour as structure and metaphor, as shapes and spaces, to reveal the truths of painting. As the curator notes, the paintings are “more a matter of mind than of mimesis.” The exhibition also underlines the deftly deliberate but seemingly effortless brushwork and sensuous line for which Fox was so celebrated. All of the drawings and watercolours, as well as the panel paintings are being shown here for the first time.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour publication, including over 60 plates as well as perceptive and eloquent texts by Sandra Paikowsky and Montreal artists Peter Krausz and Michael Smith.
John Fox (b.1927) lived and worked in Montreal, with lengthy annual visits to Venice, Italy from the mid 1970s until his death there in 2008. He influenced generations of artists in Montreal through his extensive teaching career at Concordia University and his generous friendships. Fox has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout his career and participated in group exhibitions across Canada and internationally. His work is represented in major public, corporate and private collections in Canada, the United States and Europe.