Defining the Portrait
October 30 - December 15, 2001

The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery of Concordia University is pleased to present Defining the Portrait, featuring a selection of works from its permanent collection. Curated by Sandra Paikowsky, Professor of Art History, this exhibition assembles sixty works representing the Gallery's historical, modern and contemporary collections. An illustrated bilingual brochure accompanies the exhibition.
The exhibition opens to the public on October 30 and runs to December 15. The Gallery is located at 1400, boul. de Maisonneuve Ouest, inside the J.W. McConnell & Library Building.
The exhibition Defining the Portrait presents a large number of works from the permanent collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery. This selection of Canadian paintings, sculptures, photographs and works on paper provides insight into the many meanings and definitions of the genre of the portrait and the imaging of the human figure. Portraits are one of the most enduring art historical themes and whatever their pictorial language, they are sites of identification of ourselves and of others. The portrait also persists because it has a sense of the magical, occupying that space between the real and the represented, the object and the person. Portraits are constructed by working directly from the sitter, from photographs or drawings of the subject, or are derived entirely from the artist's imagination. In every case, artists must balance the pictorial process of making an image with the objective properties of their subject.
Among the themes in this exhibition is that of the self-portrait, where the artists present a visual reckoning with their own body and personality. A second category is images of artists by other artists, describing the empathetic ties that exists between members of one segment of our cultural community. In another important group of images, the title does provide the name of the sitter but in many cases, we know no more about them than their names. The largest presentation in the exhibition is images of unknown sitters, where the artist has often chosen not to name the subject in the title, giving the work a more universal meaning. A further theme in the exhibition is the imaginary figure, where the artists freely invent their subjects, rather than working from actual sitters. Associated with this type of portraiture is the abstract portrait, where physical likeness is secondary to the sensations suggested by the human body. Finally, there is a group of works which have been categorized as the fragmented portrait. Here only segments of the body are presented, but like traditional figure painting these images continue to symbolize the fusion of the social and the aesthetic that is the primary function of the portrait.
Sandra Paikowsky will give a Curator's Talk Thursday, November 8, 2001 at 1:00 p.m in the Gallery.