PETER GNASS, BÉATRICE BOILY
Natur/Kultur
Peter Gnass
Crue
Béatrice Boily
CURATOR'S TEXT
The pairing of Peter Gnass and Béatrice Boily was born during an encounter! When Peter Gnass visited an exhibition of Béatrice Boily (2020), he realized that Béatrice Boily's practice bore many similarities to his own. What followed was a friendship, an intergenerational exchange, great conversations and collaborative projects, including this pairing in Mémoire de l’avenir.
Béatrice Boily explores the substance itself in a process-oriented practice. Crue (2019) is an intervention that took place over the course of four weeks in which the artist extracted a ton of raw clay from a river by hand before returning it to the riverbed. The images from this intervention act as both a documentation of a process and a finished photographic work. This approach allows the artist to explore the tension between what is concrete, the impermanence of sculptural manipulations and the finality of documentation. In Crue, the clay becomes much more than a simple sculptural material: it becomes an autonomous body, which carries narratives, which transforms in relation to the artist's body, and which regains a transformed autonomy upon return to the riverbed.
It is this practice that speaks to Peter Gnass, reminding him of his own work in abstraction, geometry, progressions and projections that emerge in the development of these progressive series. Peter Gnass has been exploring progression throughout his career through sculpture, drawing and installations. Peter Gnass' work presented in the context of the Mémoire de l’avenir exhibition is Natur/Kultur (1984) which is composed of a photograph of a tree damaged by an ice storm whose branches are falling to the ground. In this photograph, the artist transposes the structure of a warplane that falls to the ground and is about to crash. Gnass thus evokes destruction through nature and through culture, especially the culture of war, which is very present in the life and artistic practice of the artist, who is himself a child of the Second World War.
As a pair, Peter Gnass and Béatrice Boily propose a relationship to artistic practice that is interested in progression and process. Their art invites us to reflect on the manipulated material that holds its own narrative, and also carries the presence of the body that put it into action. This intergenerational artist couple designates a lineage in the history of contemporary Quebec art that establishes the continuity of artistic commitment to progression.
PETER GNASS - BIOGRAPHY
(he)
Born in 1936 in Germany, Peter Gnass now lives and works in the Nicolet-Yamaska municipality. His multidisciplinary career evolved over fifty years, as he is now a dominant figure of the contemporary art scene in Quebec. In 1965, at the very start of his career, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts hosted an important solo exhibition of his.
As an involved artist, excellent oral speaker and great pedagogue, he was president of the Sculptors Association of Quebec, as well as professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa from 1975 to 1996.
Gnass is a member of the Canadian Royal Academy of Arts, and has been awarded many prizes for his work. He has multiple solo and group exhibitions under his belt, presented in Quebec, in Canada, and elsewhere in the world.
Gnass has created many urbain artworks in the public sphere. For example, he signed the design of one of the most impressive metro stations in Montreal, the station Lassalle, where he played with light and direction. Gnass analyses the potential of space represenations through linear structures, light, transparencies and volumes. His pieces suggest formal and symbolic analogies in which traces and fragments of time and nature form associative links between objects and ideas.
Photo: Nina Médioni
BÉATRICE BOILY - BIOGRAPHY
(she)
Béatrice Boily is an artist born in Montreal, Canada. She obtained her MFA at the Université du Québec à Montréal with a mention of excellence in 2020. Boily already has under her belt more than ten collective and solo exhibitions, one being in Italy at the Biennale Giovani Monza in 2017.
Through a process-based approach, Boily’s practice engages the potential of the matter. She is interested in the tension of the space between the concreteness of the sculpture - the experience of its weight, its scale, its smell, its plasticity - and the impermanent character of her manipulations.
Her practice is not strictly oriented to the creation of objects: she fulfils herself through the manipulation of the matter. Her work errs along the limits of sculpture: creating a 20-meter braid in a field, drawing on bitumen with blocks of cement, lifting 40 pounds of clay tied to her hair. The matter is not only manipulated, but felt by her acting body.
These body-to-body experiences are expressed through photographic and video recordings. The images present themselves as a documentation of a process, and as images with a finished composition.