>>PREVIEW
THE ROMANTIC DISEASE: RECENT WORKS ABOUT RUSSIA
Thursday, August 3 at 7 p.m.
Art Gallery of Calgary
War is the one constant of the human experience. Wars have been fought over religion, property and even love.
And now, William MacDonnell, a Calgary painter with a long-standing interest in conflicts across the world, presents an exhibition of paintings that fills the gaps in our collective memory in a way that no history text can ever achieve.
The Romantic Disease: Recent Works About Russia is structured in two sections. The first is dominated by the large brooding canvas, Twilight Stalingrad, with studies of the Russian warship Aurora placed nearby. Above one of the series is a painting of a tulip, a symbol of memorial in Russia. On the back wall of the gallery is the painting Romantic Disease, that is another of MacDonnell’s interpretations of the cruiser, Aurora.
The second part of this exhibition is comprised of works that depict structures such as the Lubyanka, headquarters of the KGB in downtown Moscow and Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev where, during the Second World War, Nazis killed more than 100,000 Jews.
"Russia’s twentieth century is so full of idealism and tragedy, hope and betrayal that it is difficult to know whether as a nation it should be better to expose its bitter past or to choose a cultural amnesia and get on with a new century," writes MacDonnell in the exhibition’s brochure.
Yet, as current events teach us, a blank slate does not seem possible. War continues to raise its savage head. The Cold War is long over, but megalomaniacs and mere mortals with improvised weapons continue to maim, torture and kill.
Perhaps that is why it is artists who must continue to tap into the bulging supply line of human conflict and arrive at a place where the unexplainable can begin to be understood.
The paintings MacDonnell created for this exhibition after visiting Russia in 2002-03 provide viewers with the opportunity to go on a journey. MacDonnell uses metaphors and memories to fill canvases with imagery that traces yet another era of our history that has been filled with the grim realties of murder, mayhem and malfeasance.
To view The Romantic Disease, you don’t need to know about the massacre at Babi Yar, the role of the Aurora in Russia’s 1917 revolution or the sinister history of the KGB, but such information will bring an additional level of appreciation to the experience and help complete this artful exploration of Russian history by a talented local artist.
"These paintings are not history," writes MacDonnell. "But a personal attempt to understand what vague ghosts remain and which are gone, to contemplate my own response to that idea, that empire which in many ways clouded my own now-distant childhood." |
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