Vancouver Art Gallery gifted collection of 122 Modern and contemporary works – The Art Newspaper

The Vancouver Artwork Gallery (VAG) introduced on Friday (17 January) that it has obtained a promised reward of 122 works from the native collectors Brigitte and Henning Freybe valued at over C$10m ($7m).

Essentially the most vital donation of worldwide up to date artwork within the gallery’s historical past was welcome information for the beleaguered VAG, which introduced final month it was scrapping plans for a brand new C$600m ($444.6m) Herzog & de Meuron-designed constructing that had been in improvement for greater than a decade.

The Freybes have been gathering artwork for over six a long time and their numerous assortment spans portray, printmaking, sculpture, movie, images and set up. Their reward to the VAG contains works by what VAG director Anthony Kiendl calls “a few of the most vital European and North American artists working within the final 50 years”—many hardly ever proven in Vancouver—together with Nairy Baghramian, Christian Boltanski, Daniel Buren, Tacita Dean, Frank Stella, Alicja Kwade, Wolfgang Tillmans, Robert Rauschenberg, Julie Mehretu and William Kentridge. The Freybes’ assortment additionally celebrates Vancouver artists, and their reward contains work by Beau Dick, Stan Douglas, Geoffrey Farmer, Rodney Graham, Brian Jungen and Jeff Wall.

“We’re honoured to simply accept this transformative reward from the Freybes,” Kiendl stated at a celebratory reception Thursday evening. “The Freybe assortment is numerous and wide-ranging—materially, geographically and conceptually—and at its core, it honours the creativity and data that artists produce. This acquisition will reshape the gallery’s holdings of native and worldwide artwork and add vital works by main figures from the up to date artwork world.”

Highlights from the reward shall be featured in an upcoming exhibition, Postcards from the Coronary heart (18 April-5 October) and bringing collectively work, sculptures, pictures, movies and works on paper from the Sixties to immediately.

The Freybes have championed up to date artwork in Vancouver for many years. Brigitte Freybe co-founded the Modern Artwork Society of Vancouver in 1972 and, in 2015, she and her husband Henning, the retired chairman and founding father of Freybe Gourmand Meals, based Griffin Artwork Initiatives to present again to the group. Their private relationships with artists whose works they collected shall be revealed by way of archival images and ephemera additionally included in Postcards from the Coronary heart.

“That is a very particular second for us to not solely see our assortment collectively, however to share these vital and visionary inventive voices with Vancouver audiences and past,” the Freybes stated in a joint assertion. “We’re deeply invested within the Vancouver Artwork Gallery and its providing to town. Gifting our assortment to the gallery and investing in its future is our method of giving again to this vital group.”

Henning Freybe instructed The Artwork Newspaper that the reward had been deliberate for a while however that he and his spouse had been ready for the fitting second to make it official. Citing their lengthy relationship with the VAG—Henning was a board member within the Nineteen Seventies and his spouse within the 80s—he stated he felt that their legacy “was in protected fingers on the VAG. We might have donated the works to the Nationwide Gallery in Ottawa, however we knew that the artwork can be seen extra extensively right here in Vancouver and never simply saved in a basement.”

He added that the couple’s relationship with the VAG has “been a beautiful a part of our life similar to the artwork has been a beautiful a part of our life”.

Highlights of the exhibition embrace Tara Donovan’s Toothpicks (2004), a free-standing dice assembled from tons of of hundreds of wood toothpicks, which celebrates the transformation of supplies—a recurring theme within the Freybe assortment.

A jewel of the gathering is Sea Cow Treaty (Unfold) (1977), a sculptural wall-based work by Robert Rauschenberg. The assemblage encompasses a working water function with twinned faucets that emit purple and blue water into conjoined buckets. It is going to be proven for the primary time in a museum setting, with help from the Robert Rauschenberg Basis on the event of the artist’s a hundredth birthday.

One other work from the identical period included within the reward and the exhibition is Frank Stella’s Piaski III (1973). The canvas, felt and paint on corrugated cardboard work is from the artist’s vital Polish Village collection of assemblages. Brigitte Freybe instructed The Artwork Newspaper: “It was one of many first works we acquired in 1973. And it was bought to us by Doug Chrismas.” (The vendor, who began his profession in Vancouver, was sentenced to 2 years in federal jail within the US earlier this week.)