WINNIPEG, MANITOBA.-The Winnipeg Art Gallery presents Figure Ground: Paintings and Drawings of Ivan Eyre. Ivan Eyre is one of Canada’s most significant artists. Born in Saskatchewan in 1935, his early art teachers included Wynona Mulcaster, George Swinton, Ernest Lindner, and Eli Bornstein. Eyre moved to Winnipeg and completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba in 1957. After a brief course of post-graduate work in North Dakota, he returned to teach at his alma mater, becoming full Professor in 1976. Eyre’s talents as an image maker were recognized and championed early on. Former WAG Director Ferdinand Eckhardt and Professors Robert Nelson, Cecil Richards, and Richard Williams were enthusiastic supporters of his work. While a student, he exhibited at the WAG’s famous Winnipeg Shows. Since then Eyre has exhibited his work across North America and Europe. He is represented in all the significant Canadian collections.

This exhibition surveys Eyre’s interests and development as an artist. It features almost 50 years of his production, comprising detailed and intimate drawings and large 12 foot paintings. Over 27 public and private institutions have lent works, including the Assiniboine Park Pavilion Gallery Museum’s generous loan of never-before-exhibited early drawings.

Eyre’s early work shows his careful observation and study after nature, a trait in evidence throughout the exhibition. Introduced to modernist concepts as a student, Eyre tried a diverse visual vocabulary that would have been au courant in the 1950s and 1960s, including influences from Max Beckmann, Arshile Gorky, Pablo Picasso, and others. His confident line and sense of composition are evident in his student work, at a time when realism, symbolism, and abstraction were fluid possibilities. Eyre undoubtedly assimilated the poignancies of the School of Paris, the morbidity of German Expressionism, and the bravado of the Abstract Expressionists. Yet his iconography and sense of invention owe something to the rich prairie landscape and his singular insistence on following his creative imagination.