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Provenance:

Courtesy of the artist.

The Work & Artist Bio

IAIN BAXTER& is a self-described maximalist — a painter, photographer, sculptor, mixed media artist and film and video maker — who has sustained an enduring sense of the absurd. One of this country’s pioneering installation and conceptual artists, his 50 plus year-long career has now entered the terrain of the legendary, and is an “&” kind of endeavour. This important piece from 2003, called Banff Mountain Landscape, an acrylic painting on a reclaimed RCA colour TV, is from the artist’s collection and is signed on the back. On the screen you can see a necklace of green trees dotting the shoreline at the base of the imposing central brown mountain, while a flash of white sailboats scurry about on the blue water. Should you tire of all that nature, you can always choose to turn the television off. The experience of Nature is here one minute and gone the next. IAIN BAXTER& painted a number of these works, all of them were different and 10 were exhibited as an installation in 2014 called, not surprisingly, Television Works. They did and they do. This painted sculpture is a museum quality piece.

For more than 60 years IAIN BAXTER& has been making art that challenges what making art means. He is a painter, sculptor, photographer, mixed media and installation artist, a film and video maker and a performance artist. He was a forerunner of conceptual art in Canada from 1966 – 78 with the N.E. Thing Co., his Bagged Piece, 1966, was this country’s first installation piece, and in 1968 he made his first transparency lightbox. His distinguished career has been marked by numerous awards, including being made a Companion of the Order of Canada (2019), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2013), receiving the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2006), the Molson Prize (2005), the Governor-General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts (2004), and being made a member of both the Orders of British Columbia and Ontario. He is also University Professor Emeritus at the University of Windsor Center of Creative Arts and he holds five honorary doctorates. In 2011 the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago co-mounted a major retrospective called “IAIN BAXTER&: Works 1958 – 2011.” His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the AGO, MoMA in New York, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the L.A. County Museum and the Tate Modern in London, to name just some. In 2005 he officially changed his name to IAIN BAXTER&. The ampersand was a measure of the interconnectedness of all things and it also indicated the continuous nature of his practice. “It’s about the endless power of &,” he says, “and if it goes backward it is DNA.” Adapting the thinking of media theorist Marshal McLuhan, he understood that we live in a natural landscape and a landscape of information and the relationship between them has informed his practice in all media.

Riding on the &, Border Crossings Issue 154, 2020

Iain Baxter&, Border Crossings Issue 122, 2012

Prophets of Information, Profits of Figuration: Bertram brooker/IAIN BAXTER&, Border Crossings Issue 118, 2011

TrépanierBaer Gallery

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