THE WEST AT ART TORONTO
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"Shaun Mayberry of Mayberry Fine Art speaks with collectors"
Shaun Mayberry of Mayberry Fine Art speaks with collectors, Mayberry Fine Art, based in Toronto and Winnipeg. Photo: Arash Moallemi | Courtesy of Art Toronto.
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"Deborah Herringer Kiss, a first time exhibitor at Art Toronto"
Deborah Herringer Kiss, a first time exhibitor at Art Toronto, from the Herringer Kiss gallery in Calgary. Photo: Arash Moallemi | Courtesy of Art Toronto.
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"Work by artist Brian Howell"
Work by artist Brian Howell, who is represented by Winsor Gallery in Vancouver. Photo: Arash Moallemi | Courtesy of Art Toronto.
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"Shaun Mayberry of Mayberry Fine Art speaks with collectors"
Shaun Mayberry of Mayberry Fine Art speaks with collectors, Mayberry Fine Art, based in Toronto and Winnipeg. Photo: Arash Moallemi | Courtesy of Art Toronto.
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"Collectors admire work by Douglas Coupland and Evan Penny"
Collectors admire work by Douglas Coupland and Evan Penny from TrépanierBaer Gallery in Calgary. Photo: Arash Moallemi | Courtesy of Art Toronto.
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"BMW Art Car"
Robert Rauschenberg, "BMW Art Car". Photo: Arash Moallemi | Courtesy of Art Toronto.
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"Collectors speak with the gallery manager of Monte Clark"
Collectors speak with the gallery manager of Monte Clark, which has galleries in Vancouver and Toronto. Photo: Arash Moallemi | Courtesy of Art Toronto.
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"View of Art Toronto 2012"
View of Art Toronto 2012. Photo: Arash Moallemi | Courtesy of Art Toronto.
THE WEST AT ART TORONTO
By Murray Whyte
The 2012 version of Art Toronto – or, the event previously known as the Toronto International Art Fair, if you prefer – featured some 130 galleries from 23 countries. For a relatively modest fair, that’s something to trumpet, and they did. More importantly, maybe, from the Canadian point of view, was the breadth of buy-in by dealers from outside the hitherto density of Toronto and Montreal.
Wandering the aisles, Western galleries were everywhere and of all sorts, from perennial attendees like Calgary’s TrépanierBaer, with its display of creepily enthralling Evan Penny sculptures and works by Ron Moppett, to plucky newcomers like Pegasus from, of all places, Salt Spring Island, with pretty but not captivating folksy work – images of seashells and islands, along with Haida carvings.
You can read the tea leaves any way you like, but the preliminary impression one gets is the slow adoption of the initial idea of a bona fide national marketplace where dealers and collectors from across the country could gather for a one-stop shopping experience. From the first fair in 2000, aisles, typically, were filled with a welter of Toronto-based dealers, a smattering of Montrealers and the odd stray from New York or London. National representation was, for many years, more hope than reality.
But last October, even with the notable absence of such heavy hitters as Catriona Jeffries, the Western presence was fully felt. Let’s not call it a level playing field just yet. One of the conventions of the fair, never officially adopted but typically observed, is the strange virtual border that bisects the Toronto Convention Centre, with the “serious” galleries to the west, and the decorative, the diminutive and the resellers to the east. But, still, it’s a start.
One eastern exile, and unjustly so, was Saskatoon’s Darrell Bell, with arresting work by such artists as Clint Neufeld, Adrian Stimson and Wally Dion, among others. Front and centre, one of Neufeld’s porcelain-cast industrial engines in high-gloss mint green rested on a velvet divan. It was hard to miss and even harder to walk by, and if there’s another point to dragging your wares halfway across the country, I don’t know what it is. He made an impact.
Back across the border in the western end of the building, one could find Calgary’s Paul Kuhn, with pieces by Guido Molinari and Jean McEwen, and Vancouver’s Jennifer Kostuik, most notably with remarkable photographs by David Burdeny (who also showed up in the booth of Calgary’s Herringer Kiss). Equinox, the venerable Vancouver dealer, was well represented with an assortment of work by artists like Jean-Paul Riopelle, Fred Herzog and Ben Reeves.
Also present were the inevitable big-name resellers like Winnipeg’s Loch Gallery, with its major statement, a $45,000 bronze-cast wolf by Peter Sawatzky, poking into the centre aisle. Leave it to David Loch to be bold on hostile ground.
But if the trend holds, Art Toronto, with its evolving, pan-Canadian content might soon be looking for another new moniker. Art Canada, anyone? Works for me.