JACK SHADBOLT: The Ghost Universe
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Equinox Gallery 3642 Commercial Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V5N 4G2
Jack Shadbolt (1909 - 1998) was an influential Vancouver modernist whose experimentations with abstract painting in the post-war period resonated both within Canada and internationally. The body of work presented in The Ghost Universe was made between 1949 and 1959, the period after the war when Shadbolt was developing his formal vocabulary as a painter. Influenced as much by Pablo Picasso, Arshile Gorky and the Abstract Expressionists as by Northwest Coast masks and the tumultuous landscape, Shadbolt explored the symbolic and abstracted nature of images to address the human condition in the post-war age of anxiety. These works portray crawling insects, totemic shapes and stick figures contained in fields of colliding forces that allude to the traumas of the land produced by resource extraction, the uncertainties of war, and the collisions of Indigenous and colonial cultures.