Photos to neon, Vancouver Art Gallery opens three new exhibits starting Easter weekend
The playful, youth-focused Kids Take Over combines with restless new Asian art and a tribute to photo collector and donor Andrew Gruft
From the exhibition Kids Take Over, O Zhang, Horizon No. 25, 2004, chromogenic print, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of the Artist.
Vancouver Art Gallery opens Kids Take Over, Restless, and Everything Under the Sun on April 15; exhibitions run to September 11
THREE DIVERSE new exhibits showcasing the Vancouver Art Gallery’s permanent collection open on Good Friday, featuring everything from iconic historic photography to ceramic oranges to rumbling “rubble”.
Families looking for a way to spend the long weekend should check out Kids Take Over, combining some of the more playful pieces in the VAG collection with responses from local elementary and high school students. Amid the highlights of well-known artists’ works: Zhang O’s mesmerizing portrait photos of Chinese children set against endless horizons, Gathie Falk’s pyramid of oranges, and much more.
Three striking neon artworks by Paul Wong, flanked by giant portraits of Queen Elizabeth II and Mao Tse Tung, serve as the politically loaded entryway to RESTLESS: Recent Acquisitions —a display of nine recent acquisitions that celebrate the pieces in the VAG’s Institute of Asian Art. At the centre of it all is MadeIn Company’s “rumbling” pile of rubble on the floor (also called Restless) and a bold reworking of the 1930s film Charlie Chan and the Yellow Peril by Young-Hae Chung Heavy Industries.
And get a fascinating overview of the wide-ranging historical and contemporary photographs in Everything Under the Sun: In Memory of Andrew Gruft. Paying tribute to the late art collector Andrew Gruft, who died last year, it encompasses local, national, and international lens-based artists, including giants like Robert Frank and Ian Wallace, but also intriguing new discoveries. Highlights include Frank’s Trolley-New Orleans from 1955, an image that captures a microcosm of racial segregation in America; and Yevgeny Khaldei’s Berlin, Fall of the Reichstag, May 2, 1945, a silver gelatin print of Russian triumph that has haunting parallels to the war raging in Ukraine today.
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