Dalhousie Art Gallery tickled pink about major donation

Garry Neill Kennedy ranks among Canada's most significant modern artists. He’s a recipient of the Governor General’s award and the Order of Canada. He was the president of NSCAD for over 20 years. And he’s given the Dalhousie Art Gallery a very exciting present – 10 presents, to be exact.

Kennedy’s recent donation to the Gallery consists of a set of paintings entitled Six Pink Paintings and a further four untitled works.

“[It is] the largest single donation that the Dalhousie Art Gallery has received in terms of value,” states Peter Dykhuis, the gallery’s curator, who mischievously admits that there are “bragging rights” inherent in acquiring such a large and valuable donation.

“They’re in storage for now. We did exhibit them in May of 2011, in an exhibition titled 'Materials and Space: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions 2007-2010,' but when we own works like this, it’s not uncommon for us to loan them… not only are we storing the works, we’re exhibiting them as often as possible.”

Mr. Dykhuis is effusive in praising the gallery’s new additions, calling Kennedy’s donated pieces “shared cultural property” and “an intellectual gift to the nation.”

A riddle of meaning versus spectacle

Part of the point of Kennedy’s works is that they’re hard to put into words. Luckily, I had the chance to take a trip into the Art Gallery’s vaults with Michele Gallant, the gallery registrar/preparator. The Dal vaults are rather special, as the Dal Gallery is one of only two “Class-A” designated art galleries in Halifax: galleries with the controlled lighting, climate control, security, and professional personnel required to safely display art which might otherwise be too delicate for a given space.

Given this rarified status, the gallery’s vaults are brimming over with art of all kinds, both hung on the vault walls and filed away. “Our vaults are getting full,” admits Mr. Dykhuis. “So we have to be very fussy about what’s offered to us until we get larger facilities.”

In the recesses of the labyrinthine vaults, Ms. Gallant unveils Mr. Kennedy’s works. “The end result is kind of the by-product,” she explains of the chipboard and canvases. “It’s all part of the process – a process the artist establishes, rules of the game.” The latter phrase seems to me the key to unraveling Kennedy’s intentions: the paintings are something of a game he enters into with the spectator, a riddle of meaning versus spectacle.

Deceptively simple works

Six Pink Paintings is exactly what it sounds like: six chipboard squares painted neon pink, first displayed in Toronto in 1994. The squares are individually named after skin diseases: Scabies, Impetigo, Eczema, and so on, and the layering of rosy paint on chipboard does indeed resemble a cartoonish interpretation of inflamed human skin. The other four untitled works were finished in 1975: each piece is a grayscale manipulation of a base canvas, using materials such as gesso and graphite pencils.

“There’s an incredible elegance,” explains Mr. Dykhuis. “He takes a four-foot piece of canvas and, in one case, with a pencil traces each strand of the canvas weave… from a distance, then, it looks like a somewhat uniform grey finish.” Searching for meaning in the canvases, they resemble a city fog, or perhaps a misty horizon – but, of course, part of the point is that they weren’t consciously intended to resemble anything but what they are.

“When described with words, Kennedy’s process may be found to be very simple… but the results are not,” Mr. Dykhuis says of Kennedy’s deceptively guileless works. “He is criticizing the artists who were doing expressionistic-abstract paintings. He’s expressing nothing more than what can be created by playing with the material.”

Keep an eye open for Six Pink Paintings and the “untitled” works’ next turn in the limelight. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but no article can do justice to the works of one of Canada’s best-established (and most generous!) artists.