New Acquisitions

Arnaud Maggs

Arnaud Maggs was born in Montreal in 1926. In 2006, he received Canada’s highest lifetime distinction in the arts, the Governor General’s Award. Maggs was previously bestowed the Gershon Iskowitz Prize in 1991 and a Toronto Arts Award in 1992. He is a resident of Toronto. There he is represented by Susan Hobbs Gallery. Maggs is the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada.
 
In 2010 the  MacLaren purchased four recent photographs by senior Toronto artist Arnaud Maggs, entitled Scrapbook 1, 2, 3 and 4 (2009). This acquisition of a complete series by one of the most highly regarded artists in Canada sets a high standard for building our collection; it also exemplifies our commitment to...
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MacLaren New Acquisitions
Frances Thomas
Working within the traditions of modernist painting, Frances Thomas employs and advances the language of gestural abstraction. Using fluid acrylics on wood panel, she adopts a vocabulary of elliptical shapes, splattered dots, meandering lines and sweeping strokes, combined with a layered palette of monochromatic or complementary hues. Relying on an improvisational playing out of materials and ideas, Thomas arrives at a poetic distillation of thought, intuition, emotion and sensation. While the artist’s fluid aesthetic summons impressions of the rhythms, energies and patterns found in nature, these references are not explicit; instead, her imagery underscores the intensities, the desires and the mysteries of existence.
 
Frances...
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MacLaren Recent Acquisitions
Janet Jones
Toronto artist Janet Jones probes our fascination with the future. Her process begins with taking black and white photographs of sterile public spaces, such as the lobbies of multinational corporations and underground passages. Each image is observed, recorded, transmitted, digitized and frozen as if projected onto a screen. The absence of brushstrokes contributes to the apparent flatness of these paintings. As psychological impressions of the urban environment, Jones’ imagery represents places that are everywhere and nowhere: the hybrid spaces of our globalized environment that collapse the experiential and the technological, near and far, real and virtual. Jones is interested in the sublime, but a new sublime, a techno-sublime. Using light and thin layers of fluorescent...
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Photo by Jeff Thomas
Jeff Thomas Photographs

The MacLarenArtCentre recently acquired 10 photographic works by Canadian artist Jeff Thomas with the support of the Elizabeth L. Gordon Art Programme of the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation. Jeff Thomas, Iroquois/Onondaga artist, curator and writer, was born in Buffalo, USA in 1956. Currently residing in Ottawa, Thomas has been working and exhibiting in Canada since the early 1980s. His photographic series explore imagery of First Nations people and symbolism. His interests have included looking at references made to First Nations people in mainstream culture, monuments, and toys. We have acquired examples from three series: Scouting for Indians (1992 - 2007), Indians on Tour (2000 - present) and A Conversation with Edward S. Curtis (...

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