Selected Works

    At Winchester Galleries Modern

    758 Humboldt Street

    September 11 - October 2, 2010

    Opening:
    Saturday September 11, 2010
    2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

    Robert Young came into prominence as an artist in the early 1970s in England and has emerged as one of Canada’s most reflective and informed artists.  His main concerns were drawing and print-making until 1967 when painting became his primary focus.

    Robert Young was born in Vancouver in 1938.  In 1962 he achieved a BA. Honours, Art History, from the University of British Columbia.  He earned a Certificate of Merit in 1964 from The City and Guilds of London School of Art and in 1966 graduated with an Advanced Diploma in Graphics from The Vancouver School of Art.  He variously taught and exhibited in London in 1966-1976.  In 1974 The Vancouver Art Gallery mounted a Robert Young  retrospective.  The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 1980 featured an exhibition of his prints.   He was an Associate-Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of British Columbia, in 1882-1998.

    Other of his solo exhibitions include ‘Robert Young: Ten Years’ which was held at The Charles H. Scott Gallery in 1984 and ‘Robert Young: Quotidian View’ at The Burnaby Art gallery in 2009.  An exhibition of his work is planned for Simon Fraser University in the winter of 2011.

    Views of the interior of his house have been a favorite theme of Young’s during the last 30 years, and he often deploys references to both Western and Oriental art history.  He describes his path in Postmodernism as an attempt to “tease tradition back into currency,” a  trajectory which also involves teasing the viewer with pictures involving altered or subverted representational conventions so as to incorporate aspects of Modernism.  Thus, a potted chrysanthemum on a sidetable combines a photo-based versimilitude with a multi-viewpoint Cubist perspective.

    This exhibition is comprised of a diverse selection which includes Cubist and Constructivist devices, various Roman solutions to pictorial spaces, Oriental attitudes to plant forms, and subversion of classical perspective.

    Robert Young’s work is represented in the Tate Collection, National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Vancouver Art Gallery and numerous other collections.

     

Robert Young