Additional Images

Provenance:

Courtesy of the artist.

The Work & Artist Bio

There is a literal pun embedded in Eleanor Bond’s Untitled, 2023, from “The Rock Painting Suite.” It is not a pictograph, a petroglyph, or an image inside a cave. It is a painting of a rock. You can put that in your surrealist stone pipe and smoke it. Untitled does bring René Magritte to mind. The Belgian Surrealist did a number of paintings of rocks but Bond’s oil on panel carries none of surrealism’s menace and claustrophobia. Her painting is about visual pleasure and it carries the weight of the world; you hold it in your mind’s eye the way you hold a stone that fits the palm of your hand. It is a visual talisman. And her range of greys is a monument to tonal harmonics.

Eleanor Bond is a Winnipeg artist known for her large-scale painted images of urban and architectonic space, a practice based on her research of collective social experience, utopian and visionary propositions, and spaces of transition. Since 1995, she has researched and produced work on individual cities, such as Rotterdam, Salzburg, Vancouver and Windsor/Detroit, as well as continuing to make images of a range of speculative or local conditions. Bond has exhibited internationally since 1987, with major showings at Clocktower, PSI in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sao Paulo, Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam (now the Kunstinstituut Melly), and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. She has represented Canada in numerous international biennials and exhibitions at exhibition sites in Tokyo, Seoul, London, Istanbul, and Berlin, amongst others. Bond was Associate Professor in Studio Arts at Concordia University, Montréal, from 2002 to 2018. Her work is in the collections of major public institutions.

The Fine Art of Mucking About, Border Crossings Issue 117, 2011

Aerial Apparent: The Recent Work of Eleanor Bond, Border Crossings Issue 27, 1988