Simon Bilodeau and Trevor Kiernander
January 18–March 3, 2018
Art Mûr is happy to begin its 2018 exhibition program with two solo exhibitions.
Simon Bilodeau
La mélancolie à l’infini: Autant en emporte le vent
January 18–March 3, 2018 (space 2)
Opening reception on January 18, 5–8pm
The exhibition La mélancolie à l’infinie: Autant en apporte le vent (Infinite Melancholia: Gone With the Wind) presents a grouping of paintings, objects and sculptures placed in the gallery as a single installation. Through a monochromic palette of blacks, whites and grays, Bilodeau’s installation yields a sublime awareness of the perpetual cyclical movement of transience and reformation, of transitions and metamorphoses.
Simon Bilodeau depicts materiality as objective matter tamed by elemental forces or by human savoir-faire. He recovers materials with which our worlds are made: stone and metal, light and movement and presents them from a quasi-extraterrestrial perspective as innocent forms of existence.
Bilodeau manages to express, without judgment, without appeal and without prophecy, the cold and captivating beauty of an apocalyptic aesthetic—when everything finally calms down and nothing matters anymore. The exhibition is made of works of art through which the artist is presenting a vision of the world both detailed and extremely vast, one that reveals without affect an aesthetic influenced by the sublime.
(excerpt from a text by Dr. Tina Simon / translated from German by Suzanne Viot)
Trevor Kiernander
Bound and Boundless
January 18–March 3, 2018 (space 1)
Opening reception on January 18, 5–8pm
Over more than a decade, Trevor Kiernander has gradually developed an aesthetic research deeply rooted in abstraction but one that frequently flirts with representation. Objects shift in and out of visualization without ever clearly referencing any definitive subjects—merely alluding to boundless possibilities. As the viewer maps the visual components that have been so carefully intertwined in the artist’s compositions, one is forced to tackle formal questions of balance, of the weight of colours, of texture, light, transparency.
Created during his residency at LIA (Leipzig International Art Programme), the paintings and drawings presented in Bound and Boundless, Kiernander’s first solo exhibition in Germany, seem to indicate an investment on the part of the artist with the ramifications of the digitalization of images, of the tremendous possibilities of new image making and with the issue of reproduction. Bound and Boundless tackles the act of painting and drawing in the 21st century at a time where space and temporal horizons are being redefined and where things that have never met before can suddenly be placed within, alongside and through one another.
(excerpt from a text by Anaïs Castro)
About Art Mûr
Established in Montreal in 1996 and recently in Berlin in 2017 Art Mûr has evolved into one of the largest private contemporary art galleries in Canada. The gallery represents both emerging and established artists with practices ranging from painting and sculpture to new media and performance art. Well-known for its dynamic programming, which includes both solo and thematic group exhibitions, Art Mûr plays an important role in the diffusion of contemporary art in Canada and Europe.