MANITOBA.- The Winnipeg Art Gallery presents the exhibit Collection Highlights – Modernist Prairie Painters: Head, Leathers, Lochhead and Tascona through October 22. When one thinks of Modernist Painting in Manitoba four artists are at the forefront: Bruce Head, Winston Leathers, Ken Lochhead, and Tony Tascona. Each of them has played a significant role in the development of contemporary art, in particular abstract painting, in this province. In celebration of the exhibition Manitoba Modernist Architecture: 1945 – 1975, one work by each of these artists from the Gallery’s collection has been selected. They stand as examples of the innovation present in Western Canadian painting from this period.

During the 1970s Bruce Head became enamored with contoured, shaped canvases as a way to explore elements of color and space. In a desire to make the surface of a work more interesting to paint, he began manipulating the shape of the stretcher along with embedding objects behind the canvas. The results pushed the expectations of the typically flat surface of a painting. I Influenced by his surrounding environment, his Untitled work, created with brilliant oranges, reds, and yellows, finds a reference point in the late afternoon summer sunlight that bathes the Prairie landscape.

Winston Leathers also found inspiration in the landscape, particularly that which was wild and seemingly haphazard. Not interested in depicting a straight-on representation, Leathers’ expressive paintings capture the energy, movement, beauty, and spirit that the natural environment embodied and instilled. Leathers’ interest in Oriental philosophies and symbolism regarding innate energy is evident in the painting Time Forms Space Plane: area Night call (1968). According to Zen philosophy, calligraphic marks that are rendered spontaneously encapsulate both the spirit and movement found within nature and the human body. The strong black brush strokes that Leathers used record not only the force of nature he was trying to capture but the force of the artist himself.

Comparable in subject matter yet markedly different in technique, Tony Tascona’s Frozen Form (1973) could perhaps refer to the prairie farm fields in winter, where perception and delineation of distance and space is misleading. Created with acrylic enamel on aluminum, this work challenges the tradition of painting paintings as well as making allusions to the burgeoning culture of machines and technology of the time.

In a similar vein is the work of Ken Lochhead, recent winner of the 2006 Governor General Award in the Visual and Media Arts. His painting practice during the early 1960s combined the palette and impressive sense of space of the Prairies with the style of color-field abstraction. Introduced in New York by the Abstract Expressionists, namely Mark Rothko and Jules Olitski, a few years earlier, the basic components of color-field abstraction concentrated on the actual act of painting a painting, such as the way the paint lies flat on the canvas, the optical arrangements of saturated bands of color, and the way the edge of the painting can break or extend a composition. Donated in 1999, Sky Location (1967) exemplifies this marriage between a Prairie sensibility and a modern theory of painting.

Coupled with an extraordinary economic boom, Canada’s centennial was characterized by a marked awareness and celebration of Canadian culture. Created during the years leading up to and just after 1967, these four works embody the aspirations and hopes of a country during a time when the future was seemingly unlimited and ever bright – a truly modern Manitoba.