Montréal, May 6, 2006. With the eagerly awaited Pascal Grandmaison exhibition, the Musée d’art contemporain is getting a head start on next year’s cultural season. The Musée presents Pascal Grandmaison from May 27 to October 9, 2006.
“An indisputable energy”
An active presence on the contemporary art scene since the latter part of the 1990s, Pascal Grandmaison has carved out a reputation in the past few years as one of the most meticulous and innovative artists of his generation. His work suggests a new approach, not only to photography and video, but also to the way his pieces are exhibited. Often based on the portrait genre, Grandmaison’s art is distinctive for its use of formal strategies such as the close-up, white background, and fragments and details. In his works, he deals with the practice of everyday life and the hybrid nature of the descriptive and narrative qualities of the image. The exhibition’s curator, Pierre Landry, offers the following description: “Beyond an apparent detachment from people and things, Grandmaison’s works express and combine, with remarkable assurance, situations whose ambiguity contains an indisputable energy.”
Works created for the exhibition
This presentation is Grandmaison’s first solo museum exhibition. It contains nearly twenty works: photographs from five different series and three films, including some recent pieces not previously shown (the photographs Ouverture and Upside Land, and the films Air and Diamant, all from 2006). A carefully laid-out circuit leads the visitor from the photographic series Waiting Photography (2003) and Verre (2004-2005) to the disconcerting installation Air (2006, Super 16-mm film transferred to digital medium), which shows the image of a stretched-out body filmed from very close up. The breathing movement alters the brightness by making the white background of the image repeatedly move in and out of view. The film is projected on a free-standing screen set in a confined space with a low ceiling and a raised floor.
Grandmaison in the city
A visual arts graduate of the Université du Québec à Montréal, Grandmaison has had many solo and group exhibitions in Québec, across Canada and abroad. Some notable examples are Soundtracks, EdmontonArtGallery, 2003, Pascal Grandmaison, ContemporaryArtGallery, Vancouver, 2003, and the Prague Biennale, 2005.
He has made a highly visible contribution to the Montréal cityscape with his Verre series, installations of photographic portraits located around the city (Café Cherrier, Old Port, Bonsecours Market) in connection with Modello, a project of Montréal’s Musée d’art urbain and the Musée d’art de Joliette. A reproduction of Verre 2, one of the works on display in the present exhibition, is currently hanging in front of the Musée, as a further echo to this series which Montrealers have adopted as their own. In addition, the remarkable installation Solo, 2003 (colour video transferred to DVD, 21 min), presented at the Musée in 2004 in the exhibition Where, is now in the museum’s permanent collection. Pascal Grandmaison lives and works in Montréal. He is represented by Galerie René Blouin.
Catalogue
To accompany the exhibition Pascal Grandmaison, the museum has published a bilingual catalogue as part of its series of monographs on Québec artists. The catalogue includes essays by curator Pierre Landry and by Reid Shier, Director of the Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver, a selective biobibliography, a list of works and some fifty colour reproductions. It may be purchased for $29.95 at the museum’s Olivieri bookstore or Librairie ABC Livres d’art, or from your local bookseller.
Meet the artist
A meeting with the artist will be held in the exhibition galleries on May 31 at 6 p.m. The event is free of charge, and will take place in French.
The Musée d'art contemporain is a provincially owned corporation funded by the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec. It receives additional funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts, as well as financial support from the Lichen advertising agency.
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