 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
in our new location at 12 Ossington Avenue
|
As of February 1st, 2010, please visit Angell Gallery in our new location at 12 Ossington Avenue |
|
Brendan Flanaganworkexhibitions art fairs press bio |
PressGallery GoingThe Globe and Mail, December 6th 2008by Gary Michael Dault
To hear LE gallery director Wil Kucey explain it, Toronto-based painter Brendan Flanagan evidently came to some epiphany about what painting could be and maybe should be while he was working in Berlin last year, "trying to become an important international artist." Far fields look green, I guess, because it was in Berlin that, despite his nagging anxiety that Canadian landscape would seem way too provincial a subject, Flanagan painted a couple of them anyway - in his brash, pigmentally convulsive way - and, well, some things are just meant to be. It turns out Berliners loved these wild unruly paintings. And a look at Flanagan's exhibition, Black Bay, which is made of even more recent landscapes, will explain why. Flanagan is one of a handful of young painters (Peter Doig and Kim Dorland are among them) who are, in fact, in the process of reinventing landscape painting, transforming our residual Group of Seven heritage into something re-energized and formidably inventive. For Flanagan, the painted northland references, for the moment anyhow, not only the long landscape tradition, but specifically - at least for the moment - the territory (Black Bay) that held the Hudson's Bay Trading Post which once employed his grandfather. Judging from the paintings, his grandfather had no easy time of it. In the magnificent Black Bay, the forest is as black as an oil spill, and the tiny traders and trappers isolated on the snowy shores look as helpless as insects. In the stirring Meeting Place, looming, tar-like figures confront one another in a wilderness |
