Category: Artists

Canadian Artist; RCA (1940-2007)

Kenneth (Ken) Edison Danby (6 March 1940 – 23 September 2007) was born on March 6, 1940 in Sault Ste. Marie, and was destined for a career as an artist. As a 12 year old, he was already talking to career advisors about how to enrol in the Ontario College of Art (Now OCADU). In 1958, he realized this dream by enrolling at the school, but became disenfranchised with institutional education and quit two years later. Beginning first as a young artist in Toronto exploring abstract art like many other contemporaries, it was not until a trip to Buffalo, New York in 1962 to visit the Albright-Knox Gallery and take in a solo exhibition of American realist, Andrew Wyeth, that the course of his artistic career would be changed. Paul Duval has noted that, inspired by Wyeth, “the impact made by these paintings convinced Danby that he should forsake abstract painting, which he was increasingly becoming dissatisfied with and return completely to his devotion to realism.”

In 1964 Gallery Moos organized “Danby’s first one-man show, which promptly sold out and set an example that was repeated and surpassed over many years”*. Today, Danby is recognized internationally and is one of Canada’s best known artists. His work can be found in private, corporate and public institutions worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Danby received many awards and accolades, including his election to membership of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1976. He was also awarded with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal by the Government of Canada, and The Order of Ontario and the Order of Canada. Danby served on many boards, including that of the National Gallery of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts.

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Hungarian-Canadian-American Artist; (1979-        )

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Canadian-American Artist; (1974-        )

 Marcel Dzama was born 1974 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He currently lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited internationally, in particular his ink and watercolor drawings.

Dzama works extensively in sculpture, painting, collage, and film. The artist is also known for his intricate dioramas and large scale polyptychs that draw from his talents across a range of media. Dzama works in multiple disciplines to bring his cast of human figures, animals, and imaginary hybrids to life, and has developed an international reputation and followingfor his art that depicts fanciful, anachronistic worlds. The artist is also known for his work with The Royal Art Lodge. Dzama’s first book “Drawings from the Bernardi Collection” helped launch his career which gave him his first museum show at The Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario in 2003. 

Dzama’s work has been used on the covers of numerous record albums, notably The Else by They Might Be Giants, Guero by Beck and Reconstruction Site by The Weakerthans. His costume designs can be seen in music videos for the Bob Dylan song, “When the Deal Goes Down,” the N.A.S.A. song, “The People Tree,” and the Department of Eagles song, “No One Does It Like You” which he also co-directed. McSweeney’s has published two collections of his work, The Berlin Years in 2003 (reprinted in 2006) and a follow-up, The Berliner Ensemble Thanks You All, in 2008. In 2010, composer Ed Bennett created “Dzama Stories,” a piece of music inspired by Marcel Dzama, featuring Decibel and Paul Dunmall. It is music for amplified ensemble, electronics and improviser.

Dzama has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (2010) and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2008). In 2006, he had an exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, which traveled to the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, Scotland.

Marcel Dzama cites Marcel Duchamp as one of his greatest inspirations and has drawn on the artist’s near-obsession with chess as a starting point for his video A Game of Chess, 2011, in which life-size Kings, Queens, Rooks and pawns duel for supremacy in a production brought to life in Guadalajara, Mexico. The film is included in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

Over the past decade, his work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions, including Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009); Moby Dick at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009); Sobey Art Award Short List at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2009); Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities at The Museum of Modern Art New York (2008); In Me / Out of Me at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York and Kunst-Werke, Berlin (2007). In 2006, he was included in the Whitney Biennial exhibition, Down By Law: Day for Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In the late 1990s, Dzama participated in the group exhibitions Greetings from Winnipeg at the Minneapolis Co;;age of Art & Design, Minneapolis and Contemporary American Realist Drawings, the Jalane and Richard Davidson Collection at The Art Institute of Chicago (both 1999). In May 2016 at the Labs Gallery in Bologna was presented an exhibition of his works entitled “Masked Tales”, in which also exposed an Italian artist Vanni Cuoghi.

Dzama’s work is in the collections of major museums and public institutions, including the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Dallas Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island. Collectors of his work include Spike Jonze, Francios Pinault, Bennett Miller, Kevin Hearn, Don and Mera Rubell, Brad Pitt, Roy Bernardi, Jim Carrey, Leonard Nimoy, Viggo Mortensen, Gus Van Sant, and Steve Martin.

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American Artist: (1969-       )

John Grande is an American artist born in 1969 in Huntington, Long Island, NY. He attended the School Of Visual Arts earning his BFA. John moved to New York City and worked as a professional c-printer at several high end photo labs. Having the opportunity to print for high end fashion, music and fine art photographers. This highly influenced his personal vision. It allowed him to become part of the process.

Grande started his career as an artist photographing mannequins in window displays throughout Manhattan, stores such as Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue would become source material for one of his first series of paintings. Grande used the mannequins placing them in front of world disasters. Grande’s works developed using his visual and inspirational view of whats around him on the streets of New York City. He would visually asses the work by studying their compositions, and in turn created a visual technique of his own. Grande has centered his work around his studio practice . Creating his signature paintings blending techniques of photo realism and pop art. Grande explores and exposes culture – both popular and contemporary – transforming and uniquely weaving high-end symbols and icons immersed in today’s luxury lifestyle.

Grande’s newest series of paintings inspired by the organic compositions created from decaying advertisements lining the New York City streets. Grande became fascinated with what he refers to as “the city’s modern day cave paintings” and has dedicated his creative practice to bringing these compositions to life. The dialogue created by both residual deterioration and blanketed layers, left behind by years of placing and tearing down wheatpaste posters and stapled flyers against construction dividers, results in its own language, unique to the constant turnaround in New York City.

Grande has exhibited in Solo and Group Shows throughout the world (New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Korea, Italy, India, and Canada)

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Canadian Artist; CGP CPE CSGA OC OSA P11 RCA (1924-1990)

Born in Toronto in 1924, Harold Town studied at the Western Technical School and the Ontario College of Art until 1945. Following his studies, he worked as an illustrator for Maclean’s and Mayfair before becoming immersed in the art scene. He also became a lively writer, contributing essays for catalogues, and was the coauthor of the Tom Thomson biography The Silence and the Storm. Among others, he illustrated Leonard Cohen’s book Beautiful Losers and Irving Layton’s Love Where the Nights are Long: An Anthology of Canadian Love Poems.

Town traveled to New York City and Chicago in 1948, where he saw the works of American Abstract Expressionist artists. Outspoken and charismatic, he became a seminal figure in the development of abstract art in Canada. In 1953 he joined Painters Eleven, an innovative group of abstract painters that included Jack Bush and William Ronald. Active from 1953 to 1960, they exposed the public to modernist movements such as Abstract Expressionism.

Town worked in a variety of media – painting, printmaking, assemblage and collage. Collage was said to be at the heart of his work, and David Burnett wrote that they were “a complex, multi-directional interweaving of technique, materials, experience and expression.” He rocketed to prominence in the 1950s, creating an explosion of innovative work in many different series. He achieved considerable recognition for his autographic prints, a series of monoprint works produced between 1953 and 1959. Widely appreciated nationally, their reputation spread internationally as they received awards in Yugoslavia, Chile and New York. In 1958 he was awarded what was the largest public art commission to that date in Canada – a 10 by 37 foot mural for a hydroelectric dam at Cornwall, which inaugurated the St. Lawrence Seaway. Between 1957 and 1964, he had 15 solo exhibitions – in Toronto, Montreal, Regina, Vancouver, New York and New Jersey, and his work was included in about 70 group exhibitions in Canada and internationally. He was known for his inventive imagery, expressionist brushwork and his control over his painterly images, which engaged in a push-pull of dynamic tension across his surfaces.

Town exhibited internationally extensively – he represented Canada in the 1956 and 1965 Venice Biennale, and participated in the Milan Triennial, the Bienal de São Paulo, Documenta in Kassel and the World’s Fair in Brussels. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim award in 1960, and in 1966 received an honorary doctorate from York University in Toronto as well as the Order Of Canada. From the early to mid-1970s and throughout the 1980s, Town continued to work on a number of series in painting, drawing and collage. In drawing these include, the Vale Variations, (1972-1977), inspired by an erotic fantasy by his old friend Florence Vale, the Toy Horse series (1976-1982), 800 individual drawings inspired by a toy horse acquired from a local antique store, the Bug Walk series (1983) which combines collages of man-made structures and finely drawn invading insects, The Famous, (1984-1985), delicately rendered portraits of historical personages and Stages (1986-1987), where drawing combines with colourful collage. Town’s strongly figurative works of the early 1980s is echoed in the playful Muscleman series of paintings, painted like landscapes where men with thickly painted exaggerated muscles and very small heads, posed to display their mindless physiques. In 1984, Town illustrated Pas de Vingt: A Celebration of Ballet Dancers by James Strecker, and in 1990, he contributed illustrations to Strecker’s Black: A Tribute to Black Musicians. Retrospectives of his work were held at the Windsor Art Gallery in 1975 and the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1986. Town passed away in 1990, remembered for his quintessential part in shaping the Toronto modern art scene of the 1950s and 1960s. Dubbed the “the Picasso of Canada.”

SELECTED COLLECTIONS: Town is represented in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Tate Gallery, London, England; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON; the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, ON; the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta; the London Regional Art Gallery, London, ON; Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, ON; Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, AB; Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, NB; Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, SK; Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, MB; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, BC; Museum of Modern Art,Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The record price for this artist at auction is $96,000.00 for DOWN AND UP, sold at BYDealers Auction House in 2021.

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