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Friday, August 27, 2010

Halifax Exhibit Fetes Alex Colville,90

To help artist Alex Colville mark his 90th birthday, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia has mounted a small show celebrating the veteran Canadian artist.

The Halifax gallery assembled a small selection of Colville serigraph prints and preparatory sketches from its permanent collection and unveiled them in a new installation on Tuesday.

"We had a conversation with Dr. Colville, and he was happy to tell us that it was his 90th birthday [coming up], and we were just really excited to do something … to celebrate that momentous marker," AGNS chief curator Sarah Fillmore told CBC News on Tuesday.

The selected prints and sketches "speak to the work that's already on view [nearby, in the gallery], so visitors have a sense of how he constructs his paintings and the extremely mathematical kind of construction that happens in making a painting," Fillmore added.

Colville — born in Toronto on Aug. 24, 1920, but raised and since based in Nova Scotia — has been acclaimed for both portraits and landscapes inspired by his everyday life in Wolfville, as well as for the noted war-art paintings he created during the Second World War.

Fillmore described Colville's magic realist work as "a beautiful and unsettling kind of aesthetic."

"It's a really smart, cerebral, interesting kind of artwork," she said.

The Colville exhibition will continue on display in Halifax until Feb. 20.

This article was extracted from the CBC News website.

To view this article, please click here.

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