Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Toronto

Note:

David Bierk practiced in the postmodern genre by appropriating old master paintings from art history and juxtaposing them with the style and aesthetic of modern culture and mass media. This re-presentation of old work in a new context turns historical masterpieces into lively, modernized masterpieces of the contemporary period. Through this method, Bierk’s creations reflect on culture, art, history, and philosophy.

Often, Bierk would paint copies of works by artists such as Vermeer, Ingres and famed artists of the Hudson River School. His manipulation of the work creates a tension between old masterly craft on the one hand, and Modernist abstraction and industrial fabrication on the other. The audience is urged to reflect on and understand the past in order to embrace the present. In Still Life: to Art and Life: Michelangelo and Gauguin, this synthesis of various moments in art history comes together in three distinct panels. Yet the fabrication of the frame is distinctly modern suggesting that these memories of art history can be brought into the present and is continuous with contemporary methods of creation and discovery.

Many of Bierk’s contributions to the Canadian art scene were here in Peterborough, where he founded the artist-run centre Artspace in 1974 and directed until pursuing his painting career full-time in the 1980s. Subsequently in 1998, he was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and in 2002 was posthumously awarded the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal. Bierk's work appears in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto); and the Canada Council Art Bank (Ottawa) as well as numerous private collections.