Main Gallery
June 18 to August 5, 2011

Robert Young:
Lacunarian Picturing

This exhibition is one half of a two-gallery show created in collaboration with the Evergreen Cultural Centre in Coquitlam. The two exhibitions, which share the same title, provide an intriguing overview of Robert Young’s practice since 1977. A history of his work will be on view at the Evergreen Cultural Centre and an in-depth survey of his paintings of domestic architectural spaces will constitute the exhibition at the SFU Gallery Burnaby. When combined with Young’s Quotidian View exhibition at the Burnaby Art Gallery in 2009, the three shows add up to a true retrospective of an artist who has created virtual communities of chronologically disparate people and places in his art for the past fifty years. Operating at the interface of drawing and painting, his pictures are sometimes reminiscent of Renaissance formal languages and at others of a Postmodern colliding of cultures. Young’s quotational and citational practices, which date back to the early 1960s, presaged the art of the 1980s as well as the quotational times in which we live today.

Young’s exploration of the optical and spatial qualities of domestic interior spaces carries on a tradition in painting that goes back at least to 17th century Dutch painting, providing a continuity not just with the long history of picturing interiors, but also providing an important means for us today to assess the ways that paint can treat rooms and space that are substantively different from the results that are possible via photography.

Opening Receptions
Evergreen Cultural Centre: 1- 3pm, Saturday June 18
SFU Gallery: 3-5pm Saturday June 18

A 48-page catalogue of the exhibitions will be available at the opening receptions.

Robert Young graduated from UBC with a B.A. in art history in 1962. He taught painting and drawing at the University of British Columbia from 1982 to 1998. He has had solo exhibitions at the Burnaby Art Gallery(2009), the Vancouver Art Gallery(1989), the Charles H. Scott Gallery(1984), Confederation Centre Art Gallery(1981), the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria(1980), the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (1979) and the Glenbow Museum(1977).

FREE PARKING AT SFU! JUNE 18 ONLY. A printout of this e-mail or the Robert Young: Lacunarian Picturing page from the SFU Gallery site, is your parking pass in any Visitor Lot at SFU (face up on dashboard or hand to parking attendant).

Robert Young, Asparagus Crate: Winter Night in the Mandala Cave, 1992-1993
Oil on canvas, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery Acquisition Fund. Photo: Tim Bonham, Vancouver Art Gallery