The Messenger: Major Kurelek Exhibition Tour in Hamilton Runs until April 29, 2012

The Art Gallery of Hamilton at its Winter Opening on Sunday, January 29 honoured four exhibitions: William Kurelek: The Messenger; Mark Lewis: Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, Cheapside; Mark Lewis: Forte!; and Kristin Bjornerud: Safe Harbour; and Size Matters.

With members of the Kurelek Family present at its opening, William Kurelek: The Messenger is the largest exhibition of the artist’s work ever assembled. Stephen Kurelek, the late artist’s son, spoke poignantly about his father’s work and shared insight into the meaning behind several of his paintings.

As the first large-scale survey of William Kurelek in thirty years, The Messenger seeks to bring together the most important and engaging works executed by the artist during his career.

Throughout a career that spanned from the mid-1950s until his death, William Kurelek (1927-1977) and his art have meant many different things to many people. The Alberta-born, Manitoba-raised artist was a painter of innocence and fun, his scenes are reminiscences of a simpler and timeless past. He was also a chronicler of the experiences of various cultural groups in Canada, devoting entire series to Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, Irish, French Canadian, and Inuit peoples. Then there is Kurelek the anguished prophet of a modern apocalypse, his art an indictment of the secular age and a testament to unwavering faith.

An important and unique aspect of this exhibition for Canadian audiences will be the inclusion of several works from Kurelek’s highly formative period in England from 1952 to 1959. During this time the young artist underwent psychiatric treatment and converted to Roman Catholicism, which profoundly altered his subsequent approach to life and art making. It is in consideration of these early works that the exhibition reveals Kurelek’s complex psyche and the central role it played in everything he produced.

In his article “The Return of William Kurelek’s Apocalyptic Vision” (Globe and Mail, October 27, 2011), Robert Enright writes: “Kurelek emerges from The Messenger…as an artist of intense commitment and dedicated skill.

“… His subjects remain inside an essentially religious framework [but] his work reads quite differently today than it did in the sixties, when he seemed a lone and curious figurative artist in an art world dominated by abstract painting. The open-ended plurality of current art making, and a post-modern tolerance for aesthetic and personal eccentricity make Kurelek more contemporary now than when he was alive.”

Throughout his article, Enright upholds the strong messianic character of Kurelek’s later work, which originally seemed more like that of a romantic with “his naivet replaced by a single-minded apocalyptic vision” after his religious conversion. Kurelek’s Prairie paintings, created in a transition period of the artist’s personal spiritual life, ‘bridge the pastoral and the prophetic’, as read in the exhibition’s accompanying publication. Enright in his excellent review refers to examples of titled works in the exhibition, the last of which were the artist’s record of vengeance, most evident as strong moral condemnations of society set in an urban landscape of destruction. He describes Kurelek’s “re-invention as a proselytizer with a palette board and a message of impending and unavoidable Armageddon.”

On tour, the exhibition opened at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in September 2011, and after the Art Gallery of Hamilton now showing until April 29, will travel to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria for its final showing from May 25 to September 3, 2012. This exhibition includes over 80 paintings that encompass the artist’s entire practice. The works are drawn from major private, corporate, and public collections in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. A major publication is available.

The Kurelek exhibition, a partnership between the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, is co-curated by Mary Jo Hughes, Tobi Bruce, and Andrew Kear. This project is generously funded by the Canadian Government through the Department of Canadian Heritage Museums Assistance Program. Visit www.kurelek.ca for more information about the exhibition.

The Kurelek, Lewis, and Bjornerud exhibitions are part of A League of Their Own, a year-long celebration of visionary Canadian artists at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. The themed year is presented by TD. Visit www.artgalleryofhamilton.com for complete exhibition and programming information. (NP compiled from media releases and reports)

PHOTOS

1 - William Kurelek – Self-Portrait

2 - William Kurelek – This is the Nemesis

3 - William Kurelek – The Ukrainian-Pioneer