Robert Young, Study for Incidence of a Cone in a Quiet Dwelling, 1997, oil on linen.
Robert Young, Alcove with Harunobu Window, 2004, watercolor and gouache on watercolour paper.
Robert Young, View With, 2004, acrylic, oil and egg tempera on linen.
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Robert Young: Lacunarian Picture, installation view, 2011, SFU Gallery. Photo: Blaine Campbell.
Robert Young: Lacunarian Picturing
June 18 – August 5, 2011
SFU Gallery
This exhibition is one half of a two-gallery show created in collaboration with the Evergreen Cultural Centre in Coquitlam. The two exhibitions, which share the same title, provide an intriguing overview of Robert Young’s practice since 1977. A history of his work will be on view at the Evergreen Cultural Centre and an in-depth survey of his paintings of domestic architectural spaces will constitute the exhibition at the SFU Gallery in Burnaby. When combined with Young’s Quotidian View exhibition at the Burnaby Art Gallery in 2009, the three shows add up to a true retrospective of an artist who has created virtual communities of chronologically disparate people and places in his art for the past 50 years. Operating at the interface of drawing and painting, his pictures are sometimes reminiscent of Renaissance formal languages and at others of a Postmodern colliding of cultures. Young’s quotational and citational practices, which date back to the early 1960s, presaged the art of the 1980s as well as the quotational times in which we live today. Young’s exploration of the optical and spatial qualities of domestic interior spaces carries on a tradition in painting that goes back at least to 17th century Dutch painting, providing a continuity not just with the long history of picturing interiors, but also providing an important means for us today to assess the ways that paint can treat rooms and space that are substantively different from the results that are possible via photography.
Robert Young graduated from UBC with a B.A. in art history in 1962. He taught painting and drawing at the University of British Columbia from 1982 to 1998. He has had solo exhibitions at the Burnaby Art Gallery (2009), the Vancouver Art Gallery (1989), the Charles H. Scott Gallery (1984), Confederation Centre Art Gallery (1981), the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1980), the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (1979) and the Glenbow Museum (1977).
Events
Opening Receptions
Evergreen Cultural Centre: Saturday, June 18, 2011, 1–3pm
SFU Gallery: Saturday, June 18, 2011, 3–5pm