Hamilton, Ontario.- The Art Gallery of Hamilton is proud to present “William Kurelek: The Messenger” on view at the museum from January 28th through April 29th 2012. Throughout a career that spanned from mid-1950s until his death, William Kurelek (1927-1977) and his art have meant many different things to many people. The Alberta-born, Manitoba-raised artist was a painter of innocence and fun, his scenes reminiscences of a simpler and timeless past. He was also a chronicler of the experiences of various cultural groups in Canada, devoting entire series to Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, Irish, French Canadian, and Inuit peoples. Then there is Kurelek the anguished prophet of a modern apocalypse, his art an indictment of the secular age and a testament to unwavering faith.
An important and unique aspect of this exhibition for Canadian audiences will be the inclusion of several works from Kurelek’s highly formative period in England from 1952 to 1959. During this time the young artist underwent psychiatric treatment and converted to Roman Catholicism, which profoundly altered his subsequent approach to life and art making. It is in consideration of these early works that the exhibition reveals Kurelek’s complex psyche and the central role it played in everything he produced. As the first large-scale survey of William Kurelek in thirty years, The Messenger seeks to bring together the most important and engaging works executed by the artist during his career.
The exhibition opens at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in September 2011 and will travel to Hamilton early next year before its final showing in Victoria during the summer of 2012. This exhibition includes over 80 paintings that encompass the artist’s entire practice. The works are drawn from major private, corporate, and public collections in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. A major publication will be available in September 2011. The exhibition, a partnership between the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, is curated by Mary Jo Hughes, Tobi Bruce, and Andrew Kear.
William Kurelek was born near Whitford, Alberta in 1927, the oldest of seven children in an Ukrainian immigrant family: Bill, John, Winn, Nancy, Sandy, Paul, Iris. His family lost their grain farm during the Great Depression and moved to a dairy farm near Stonewall, Manitoba. He developed an early interest in art which was not encouraged by his hard-working parents. He studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and at the Instituto Allende in Mexico, but was primarily self-taught from books. By his mid-twenties he was living in England. In 1952, suffering from clinical depression and emotional problems he was admitted to the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in London. There he was treated for schizophrenia. In hospital he painted, producing “The Maze”, a dark depiction of his tortured youth. His experience in the hospital was documented in the LIFE Science Library book The Mind, published in 1965. He was transferred from the Maudsley to be at Netherne Hospital from November 1953 to January 1955, to work with Edward Adamson (1911-1996), a pioneer of art therapy. At Netherne he produced two masterpieces – Where Am I? Who Am I? Why Am I? (donated to the American Visionary Arts Museum by Adamson) and I Spit On Life (still in the Adamson Collection). Originally Ukrainian Orthodox, Kurelek converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1957.
He painted a series of 160 works on the Passion of Christ, and a series of 20 depicting the Nativity as if Christ had been born in Canadian settings: an igloo, a trapper’s cabin, a boxcar, a motel. He maintained a cottage near Wilno, Ontario, where he got his inspiration for a book of paintings entitled The Polish Canadians, and was a friend of the nearby Madonna House Apostolate. He returned to Toronto, writing and illustrating a series of children’s books, several of which have become modern classics. In 1974 he illustrated a new edition of W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen The Wind. He won the Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Illustrator’s Award for A Prairie Boy’s Winter in 1974 and A Prairie Boy’s Summer in 1976. In 1976, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada. He visited Ukraine in 1970 and again in 1977, publishing To My Father’s Village. He died in Toronto in 1977. His archives, and a substantial body of his work, including the Passion mentioned above, are held at Niagara Falls Art Gallery.
The Art Gallery of Hamilton, is located in the heart of downtown Hamilton, Ontario on King Street West and is one of Canada’s oldest galleries with a collection of over 9,000 works of art. Artist William Blair Bruce, born and raised in Hamilton and successful internationally, died suddenly in 1906. In 1914, his family, including his widow, sculptor Caroline Benedicts-Bruce bequeathed 29 of his paintings to the city of Hamilton, with the understanding that a properly equipped art gallery be established to house and present the collection. Today, the William Blair Bruce memorial donation is displayed in a dramatic salon-style hanging in what is the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s third home. From 1914 until 1953, the Gallery’s first home was the second floor of the Hamilton Public Library building located on Main Street West near James Street. In 1947, the Gallery was a founding member of the Southern Ontario Gallery Group, now the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. In December 1953, a new purpose-built gallery was opened at Forsyth Avenue and Main Street in west Hamilton. A little over a decade later, McMaster University unveiled plans to expropriate the lands on which the Gallery was built, halting plans to expand the Gallery in this location. In 1977, the Gallery opened in its present location in the heart of the city as part of a downtown redevelopment project. In 2005, a renovated Gallery reopened, with new gold-coloured steel cladding protecting the building, a glass-enclosed front entrance on King Street, a new multi-purpose pavilion, and larger and renovated exhibition spaces.The AGH primary collection is based on Canadian historical, Canadian contemporary and European historical art. Each year, the Gallery organizes, hosts and/or circulates approximately 25-30 exhibitions throughout the world. The Art Gallery of Hamilton’s collection of modern Canadian art is one of the strongest in the country, due, in no small part to the vision and efforts of Thomas Reid (T.R.) MacDonald (1908–1978), the Gallery’s first full-time director and curator. MacDonald soon inaugurated the Annual Winter Exhibition at the Gallery; this yearly exhibition was held from 1948-1973. These juried exhibitions provided artists with an important exhibition venue and also brought works to Hamilton that might be acquired by the Gallery. Usually about one hundred works were featured in each exhibition, with the purchase prize (generally donated by a local patron or business) entering the AGH permanent collection. In this way, such important works as A.J. Casson’s “First Snow”, Lilias Torrance Newton’s “Keith MacIver”, and the iconic “Horse and Train” by Alex Colville. Visit the gallery’s website at … http://www.artgalleryofhamilton.com