A closer look

Expressive power, emotional encounters: A closer look at Rothko’s Brown and Blacks in Reds

WHAT IT IS: Brown and Blacks in Reds, a 1957 painting by American artist Mark Rothko.

This work recently sold for US$85.8 million during a record-setting evening at Sotheby’s auction house, raising vexing questions about what we mean when we talk about the value of art.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Brown and Blacks in Reds offers a sombre example of Rothko’s most immediately recognizable period, with stacked blocks of colour vibrating against an intense ground. It is usually classified as a colour field painting, part of the larger abstract-expressionist movement of the 1940s and ’50s. (Rothko himself famously disliked both these terms.)

Mad Men fans might recall a Season 2 episode in which eccentric senior partner Bert Cooper acquires a Rothko painting something like this. (“I heard it cost $10,000,” Sal says.) Some of the younger employees sneak into Cooper’s office to look at it.

Deer-in-headlights look fitting for disgraced ‘prince’

WHAT IT IS: A press photo of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor leaving a Norfolk police station after he was arrested on charges of misconduct in public office and held for 11 hours.

Unadorned forms make for engrossing experience

WHAT IT IS: A minimalist installation that opens up to multiple experiences and interpretations, Continuum: When Water Pauses and We Move is part of the 2026 edition of the Warming Huts on the Nestaweya River Trail at The Forks.

German designer Franziska Agrawal, this year’s invited artist, has constructed a 30-metre passageway of flat arches, each made entirely from super-compacted snow.

As the title hints, Agrawal is flipping a common trope. In the summertime, we often stand on the bank and watch the river go by, the ceaseless flow making us aware of movement and change. In Winnipeg’s winter, the water is now still, frozen in place, and we are moving over and through it.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Trained in industrial design, Agrawal often works between art and architecture on site-specific installations. She often uses natural materials that can take on gravity-defying forms but eventually return to nature, whether that’s an ice hotel in Lapland or a sand sculpture on a summer beach.

Serif tiffs, type gripes and character assassination

WHAT IT IS: The U.S. State Department has spent the last several days at the centre of a font debate, after a Dec. 9 announcement that official department documents would use Times New Roman typeface, ousting the Calibri typeface instituted during the former administration.

For a department accustomed to monitoring serious global conflicts, this “fontroversy” involves considerably smaller stakes.

Still, as history has proven, typeface wars can be hard-fought and fraught, sometimes even vicious.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: The miracle of mass-produced printed language relies on typefaces, which are standardized sets of letters, numbers and symbols. Several factors go into the design of what is estimated to be the roughly 200,000 different typefaces now in use, including shape, spacing, weight and contrast.

Closer look: Oval Office overhaul reflects Trump’s more-is-more m.o.

WHAT IT IS: Donald Trump, like American presidents before him, has redecorated the Oval Office to reflect his own tastes. Depending on your politics, this “extreme goldening,” as it’s been called, is either Trump being Trump or a would-be Sun King demanding a backdrop of extravagant, pseudo-baroque excess.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: When I was an art history student, one of my professors started his course in visual semiotics by lamenting the design of what was then the newly built Toronto Police Headquarters, which used glass bricks in its facade. Didn’t the architects realize glass bricks were associated with the architecture of Italian fascism, he asked. Why would they want to connect the city’s police force to a repressive regime?

My prof had wildly overestimated the average Torontonian’s interest in Mussolini modern, but his point still stands. The design of buildings, inside and out, carries historical associations, and those associations convey meanings.

So, what is the meaning of Trump’s maximalist makeover of the Oval Office?

Closer look: Sharing a gaze across centuries of time

A painting of oil and tempera on wood, Portrait of a Lady (dated about 1540) by German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, is from the WAG-Qaumajuq’s permanent collection. It is currently on view as part of the historical collection of paintings, sculpture, furniture and decorative art in the long, narrow Gallery 1.

With intersection’s re-opening, pedestrians will gain new perspective of Ivan Eyre’s North Watch

WHAT IT IS: I’ve been thinking recently about Ivan Eyre’s North Watch, located on the plaza outside the Richardson Building near the corner of Portage and Main. That’s partly because, like many Winnipeggers, I’ve had more time to look at it because I’ve been stuck in my car in construction-slowed traffic.

But I’m also thinking ahead to when the construction is done, and more pedestrians will be walking the sidewalks around the city’s most famous intersection. That’s when people will be able to experience this massive, monumental bronze sculpture as they should — in a one-on-one, on-the-ground physical encounter.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Eyre, who died in 2022 at age 87, was one of Manitoba’s most important and influential artists and teachers. He worked prolifically across media, and his drawings, paintings and sculptures have been shown in hundreds of solo and group exhibitions, locally, nationally and internationally.

Many of Eyre’s large-scale bronzes focus on hybrid human forms, filtering historical influences through his own introspective and obsessive imagination. These works stand somewhere between figurative realism and stylized abstraction, between stately classicism and unsettling surrealism.

Exhibition focused on cardiac care pulses with personal expression and family impacts of medical intervention

WHAT IT IS: Depicting two stages of a cardiac medical procedure, this pair of photographs is part of the exhibition Cardially Yours by Winnipeg artist Charles Romero Venzon, now on view at Galerie Buhler Gallery.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Located within the St. Boniface Hospital, Galerie Buhler Gallery often shows art that specifically speaks to this institutional context, addressing issues around medicine, healing and physical and mental health.

These large-scale digital prints, documenting before-and-after images of an angioplasty, get to the heart of the matter. Venzon’s show is centred around the Cardiac Sciences Manitoba program at St. B., and these images suggest the hidden labour and complex skills that keep this crucially important unit of the hospital ticking.

In a months-long process, Venzon — who works across media but does a lot of lens-based art — was given close access to the cardiac-care program’s health professionals and their working environments. He photographed nurses, doctors, medical technicians, cleaners, clerks and Hero, the therapy dog.

Artist Dominique Rey makes case motherhood a catalyst for creativity

WHAT IT IS

Domestic Frieze 03, a large-scale archival pigment print, is part of Franco-Manitoban artist Dominique Rey’s solo exhibition MOTHERGROUND, now on view at WAG-Qaumajuq.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT

In historical terms, friezes were long panels of sculpture or painting that usually depicted big subjects — heroic battles, civic processions, religious scenes. Here a series of linked photomontages stretching across one of WAG-Qaumajuq’s gallery walls suggests this format, but Rey uses it to call up the everyday back-and-forth of the mother-child relationship.

Undercurrent of climate dread flows through haunting landscape

WHAT IT IS: We can not abandon such beauty is a 2023 work by Marcel Dzama, a Canadian artist raised in Winnipeg and now living in New York. This mixed media-on-paper landscape — modest in its dimensions but outsized in its chromatic intensity and apocalyptic beauty — is part of his new solo show at Plug In ICA.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Ghosts of Canoe Lake: New Works by Marcel Dzama was initially organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the Kleinburg, Ont., museum that is a repository of works by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. Dzama’s work can be seen as both a sincere homage and a subversive challenge to that artistic legacy.

There are Group of Seven riffs in the style of We can not abandon such beauty, in the intense colours and the textured, painterly marks. And there are clear historical references in the subject matter, those spindly pines reflected in deep water calling up the raw, rough renderings of the Canadian wilderness we see in the paintings of Thomson and the Group. The text next to the work suggests there could be connections to the early work of Lawren Harris, or perhaps Arthur Lismer.

But there’s a sudden outbreak of oddity in the foreground — on our side of the lake, so to speak. A masked and bodysuited female figure — a bit whimsical, a little sinister — reaches out with an ambiguous gesture to an owl. The woman seems fated to remain in mime-like silence. The miffed little bird, on the other hand, as with so many of Dzama’s creatures, looks like it could say a few things.

Artwork explores dark legacy of resource extraction

WHAT IT IS:

Part of an exhibition of mixed-media works on view at aceart until Oct. 18, extracted I by Brandon-based artist Ben Davis, examines the human and environmental costs of intense resource-extraction operations.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Building on an initial collaboration with Kevin Walby, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Winnipeg, Davis has undertaken a years-long research project looking at a decommissioned mining site near Uranium City, a community just south of the border between Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories, on the traditional territory of the Chipewyan Dene people.

AI’s clichéd creativity

WHAT IT IS: This is a mountain landscape generated by Adobe Firefly with text-to-image prompts. Using pixels instead of paint, machine algorithms instead of purely human imagination, it’s an example of the AI-created imagery increasingly infiltrating our visual universe.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: AI-generated images are often deployed in divisive and destructive ways. Within our polarized political discourse, pictures can be cooked up to dehumanize opponents and elevate cult leaders. AI-generated content can be used for deepfakes, frauds and misinformation.

But even when AI images are neutral and anodyne — who doesn’t like a majestic mountain scene? — they are almost always kitschy and clichéd.

A recent article in The Atlantic by Caroline Mimbs Nyce explores the relentless sameness of AI images. There’s a certain “look,” Nyce points out, that persists not just within a particular image-generating model but across the different programs offered by the big tech companies. This comes down primarily to the parameters of the technology, which include the banks of images the models work from and the way these images are evaluated and matched with verbal cues.

Circular work at WAG-Qaumajuq embraces the whole of warmth, strength and life

WHAT IT IS: Warm Heart Wheel: My Medicine Series (2022-23) is a mixed-media work by Winnipeg-based artist Lita Fontaine. Now on view at WAG-Qaumajuq, it’s part of Winyan, a solo show mixing recent and foundational works by the 66-year-old Fontaine, who is of Anishinaabe, Dakota and Métis descent.

Get up close and personal to comprehend true depth of Riopelle’s vision

WHAT IT IS: Poussière de Soleil (1953-1954), or Sun Dust, by Jean-Paul Riopelle is part of a retrospective exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Canada and now on view at WAG-Qaumajuq. Marking the centennial of Riopelle’s birth, the show covers five decades of the Quebec artist’s prolific and searching work in several mediums, including his iconic and influential abstract paintings of the 1950s. WHAT IT’S ABOUT: With Sun Dust, Riopelle (1923-2002) is creating not a realistic representation of the physical world but rather an abstract evocation of the energy and beauty of nature. The image can be interpreted as […]

Transformational in form and spirit

In our new monthly series, A Closer Look, Free Press contributor Alison Gillmor will look at a work of visual art. Examining everything from historical oil paintings to contemporary videos, she’ll ask what these artworks can tell us now, about our lives and our world. WHAT IT IS: O-ween du muh waun, by Rebecca Belmore and Osvaldo Yero, is an “anti-monument,” as the artists have called it, installed in downtown Winnipeg’s Air Canada Park as part of the 2018 public art project THIS PLACE. A stack of 30 chairs made from Corten steel, placed upside down on a concrete base, […]

Gardner’s prosaic red cup runneth over

When this image is reproduced, it could easily be mistaken for a photograph. Gardner’s work intrigues us partly because we want to see how it is different from its photographic source. We search for evidence that this is a surface drawn and coloured by pastel. We look for traces of the artist’s hand.