New Brunswick’s oldest independent art gallery opens work by Cliff Turner, George Paginton and Barbara Safran de Niverville.
Gallery 78 welcomes the arrival of spring three new exhibitions, Floral by Cliff Turner, George Paginton: Plein-air Paintings of Eastern Canada, and Vanitas by the Sea by Barbara Safran de Niverville.
Floral by Cliff Turner
In this lavish new exhibition, Cliff Turner delves deep into the subject of arrangements. These paintings depict different times of day and circumstances surrounding the floral centrepieces depicted. Aside from the floral element in each piece, Cliff remains, as he says, “obsessed with the description of light on surface as a central focus in the work.”
“The floral still life began as a starting point,” said Turner. “What began as a purely decorative exercise in realism lead to contemplating the arrangement in a variety of contexts: beginning with the riots in the United States and ending with two trompe l’oeil paintings marking the reopening of the Beaverbrook.”
George Paginton: Plein-air Paintings of Eastern Canada
George Alfred Paginton (1901-1988) was a painter who belonged in spirit and in time to a class of Canadian artists that included the members of the Group of Seven, David Milne, Goodridge Roberts, Anne Savage, and more. He studied at the Ontario College of Art Summer School under John William Beatty, among others.
As a plein-air painter, he crossed the entire country from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, through Québec and Ontario, to Alberta and British Columbia.
Feeling adrift from his native United Kingdom (he was a British Home Child and arrived in Canada at 11 years old), Paginton captured colourful and lively landscapes in his new homeland. Amid the significant industrial changes that were happening in the locales he painted, Paginton succeeds in conveying a feeling of comfort and hope.
Additional Programming: As part of this exhibition of George Paginton’s work, Gallery 78 will host a virtual talk with art specialist Kelly Juhasz, an appraiser in Toronto who works with the Paginton family to organize exhibitions, donations, and the sale of his works to private galleries across Canada. This event is free to attend and will take place Thursday April 7 from 7-8 p.m. Click here to join!
The Beaverbrook Art Gallery is showing a travelling exhibition, George Paginton: Painting a Nation, and it opens April 2-3. The gallery is offering free admission Saturday from 10-5 and Sunday 12-5. Don’t miss these special shows!
Vanitas by the Sea /Vanitas par la mer by Barbara Safran de Niverville
Featuring a striking collection of drawings on acrylic painted boards, photographs on aluminum, and coloured pencil drawings on black paper, this exhibition is both haunting and enchanting. Barbara Safran de Niverville evokes the mysterious resilience of uncultivated growth between beach and forest.
Barbara references the Vanitas genre of Baroque Western Art, and portrays realistic and symbolic objects to suggest the hubris of mankind and the inevitability of mortality. She has reinterpreted this point of view, while recognizing the subtle influence of the present pandemic. She has chosen to include objects in her work that are worn with use but seem to possess an aura of their past significance, much like the shadowed land they inhabit.
“Using a combination of natural and synthetic materials, my mixed-media panels represent a metaphor for the hybrid quality of the natural world,” Safran de Niverville. “I question our concept of wilderness and reveal the flux between Nature and Culture and the tension between growth and decline. My work explores outcast and forgotten areas of landscape that retain traces of human use. Essential to my process is experimentation, through digital photography, drawing, and testing new combinations of art techniques and industrial products.”
Additional Programming: On Sunday, April 3, meet Barbara Safran de Niverville and experience her exhibition in person from 1-4 pm!
The works in these exhibits are available online, and the opening is Friday, April 1, from 5-7 pm. This will be with Gallery’s first public opening of the year, and their first since COVID without the need to register in advance. Visitors must wear masks while inside from 5-7 p.m., that way more people can join in the event safely.
The exhibits will be on display until Saturday, April 30, 2022.
