Catch the Guo Pei Exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery Before It Closes

The final dates for two ground-breaking exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery are fast approaching. If you have a penchant for breathtaking, over-the-top fashion, and/or multidisciplinary Indigenous art, head to the Gallery as soon as you can.

As well, new, exciting exhibitions are slated to open in their place, giving you plenty to look forward to at the Gallery this year.

Current Exhibitions

Guo Pei: Culture Beyond, running until January 20, 2019, is the inaugural Canadian exhibition that charts the prolific and visually stunning career of the famed Chinese couturière. Expect forty dramatic pieces from the designer’s iconic runway shows that span over a decade of creativity (2006-2017). Guo, the only Chinese national to be invited to join Paris’ Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, has earned her place in the global fashion world due to her bringing together of current materials, techniques, and artistic sensibility with Chinese symbols, history, and traditional techniques and fabrics. The exhibition is an exquisitely textured visual feast.

Dana Claxton: Fringing the Cube, running until February 3, 2019, is also an exhibition not-to-be-missed. Claxton, a Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux) artist based in Vancouver, performs her own cultural artistic border crossings with multimedia work that meshes Western aesthetics with Lakota traditional practices. The resulting pieces, which emerge in the form of photography, video, text, and installation works, play with Indigeneity, female subjectivity, physicality, and conceptions of beauty. Always provocative, always clever in her challenging of convention and stereotype, Claxton reimagines what it means to be an Indigenous female artist in contemporary Canadian society.

You also have until March 17, 2019, to catch both A Curator’s View: Ian Thom Selects, a carefully selected assemblage of works from the Gallery’s permanent collection by Ian Thom, a retired and beloved Senior Curator-Historical; as well as The Metamorphosis, contemporary works from the Gallery’s permanent collection that are centred on the theme of transformation.

The Offsite (1100 West Georgia Street between Thurlow and Bute Streets) Fitness for All runs until March 31, 2019, and is the work of Polit-Sheer-Form Office, an art collective that plays with notions of community and sharing through activities like eating and physical exercise. Their Vancouver piece is inspired by the Chinese state’s attempt to motivate the populace through exercise programs in the early 2000s.

Upcoming Exhibitions

The Vancouver Art Gallery has an ambitious winter and spring line-up.

The most anticipated is French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850-1950, which will run from February 16 to May 20, 2019 and feature sixty sculptures and paintings from artists such as Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and August Rodin. The works, coming from the Brooklyn Museum, cover a prolific and intense period of French modernist innovation and highlight movements like Impressionism and Surrealism.

In parallel, from February 16 to May 20, 2019, Affinities: Canadian Artists and France will situate Canadian artists in relation to the avant-garde movements in France.  Artists showcased will include Emily Carr, Mary Scott, and J.W. Morrice.

Victoria artist Mowry Baden‘s solo exhibition (March 2 to June 9, 2019) will be a compelling look at Baden’s four decades of artistic creation with sculptural and installation works that spotlight a range of unexpected materials in a playful, humorous manner. Expect to be drawn into these intricate expressions of contemporary life and space.

Displacement (March 2 to June 9, 2019) will be the theme of an exhibition that will draw from the Gallery’s collection and feature the work of artists like Ken Lum, Holly Ward, and Tim Paul.

Finally, Moving Still: Performative Photography from India (April 20 to September 2, 2019) will look at the work of contemporary, diverse photographers based in India who explore a variety of issues in that country, including gender, religion, and national affiliations.

Further information on all exhibitions can be found on-line.