John Greer (sculptor)

Last updated

John Greer
Born1944
Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada
Website www.artistjohngreer.com

John Greer RCA (born 1944) is a Canadian sculptor who likes to bring cultural and natural history together. [1] One critic calls him one of Canada's most philosophically minded artists. [1] He looks to ancient Celtic stones and Greek sculpture for inspiration. [2] Greer was the catalyst behind "Halifax Sculpture," a 1990s movement, rooted in minimalism and conceptualism. [3]

Contents

Life and work

Born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Greer studied Fine Art from 1962 to 1967 in Halifax at the Nova Scotia School of Art (1963-1964), at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts school (sculpture, 1966) and at the Vancouver School of Art (painting, 1967). [4] He has exhibited his work since 1967 extensively in Canada, USA, Korea and Europe. He taught sculpture at NSCAD University in Halifax for 26 years and is based in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, and Pietrasanta, Italy. [3] He views sculpture as his language and tries to engage the viewer in his work. [5] Greer has had the admiration of his artist-peers for many years, as the following quote from Ron Shuebrook, writing in 1987, suggests. [6]

...it is Greer's carved marble and cast bronze sculptures that confirm his place as one of the most compellingly thoughtful and accomplished sculptors at work in Canada.

His exhibits include:

Origins (1995), installed outside the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax Origins AGNS.jpg
Origins (1995), installed outside the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax

In 2009, he installed the piece Humble Ending in La Serpara, a sculpture garden North of Rome. He held the solo exhibition of APPRÉHENSION - APPREHENSION at Galerie Samuel Lallouz in Montreal, PQ in 2009. In 2011, his work The Sirens was permanently installed in a private park in Switzerland. The large-scale installation Cradle was completed in the spring of 2012 for the same private collection. In 2014, Greer co-founded “Intercontinental Sculpture Inc.”, in order to be able to handle more successfully the business part of creating art for the public domain. [5]

The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia had a major travelling retrospective of Greer's work, retroActive, curated by David Diviney, which opened in 2015. A reviewer wrote that the real story of this exhibition was that Greer changed from being a sculptor whose work was based on theory to being one who was object-based. [8] In 2017, he installed The Rule of Law is a Reflection of Us All in the McMurtry Gardens of Justice in Toronto. [5] Also in 2017, he created the Canadian Building Trades Unions Monument, a collaboration with architect Brian MacKay-Lyons, for the Canadian Building Trades Unions which is now located in the collection of the National Capitol Collection in Ottawa. It won the "Award of Merit: Public Places and Civic Spaces" in the Urban Design Awards of the city of Ottawa. [5]

Greer is the recipient of numerous awards and grants; in 2009, he received one of the prestigious Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts in recognition of his lifetime achievement and significant contribution to contemporary Canadian visual art. He received the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (1998) from the Canada Council for the Arts and first prize at the 1991 International Sculpture Symposium, "Matière à Musée" in Montreal. [3]

Greer was a founding member of one of Canada's first artist-run centres (Eyelevel Gallery), and is a long-term supporter of CARFAC (Canadian Artists' Representation/Le Front des artistes Canadiens). [3]

Honours

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Daudelin</span>

Charles Daudelin, was a French Canadian pioneer in modern sculpture and painting. He worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, metal and ceramic sculpture, jewelry, and marionettes which he made with his wife, Louise.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NSCAD University</span> Public art school in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

NSCAD University, also known as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), is a public art university in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The university is a co-educational institution that offers bachelor's and master's degrees. The university also provides continuing education services through its School of Extended Studies.

William Edward deGarthe (1907–1983) was a Finnish painter and sculptor who lived for much of his life in Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté</span>

Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté was a French Canadian painter and sculptor. He was one of the first native-born Canadian artists whose works were directly influenced by French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

Garry Neill Kennedy, was a Canadian conceptual artist and educator from Halifax, Nova Scotia. In the mid-1970s, he created works that investigated the processes and materials of painting. In the first decade of the 2000s, he expanded his work to investigate art and its social, institutional, and political framework.

Roy Kenzie Kiyooka was a Canadian painter, poet, photographer, arts teacher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emanuel Hahn</span> German-Canadian sculptor (1881–1957)

Emanuel Otto Hahn was a German-born Canadian sculptor and coin designer. He taught and later married Elizabeth Wyn Wood. He co-founded and was the first president of the Sculptors' Society of Canada.

John Hooper, was an English-born Canadian sculptor known for his colourful polychromed wood carvings. His works can be found on public display in many locations throughout Canada and worldwide.

Michael Fernandes is a Canadian experimental artist and art educator based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His work uses familiar, even banal materials to ask the viewer to confront the boundary between daily life and art.

Ron Shuebrook is an American-born Canadian abstract artist living in Guelph, Ontario. He is a prominent teacher and administrator, as well as a writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carol Hoorn Fraser</span> American-born Canadian artist ((1930–1991)

Carol Hoorn Fraser (1930–1991) was an American-born figurative artist who worked for thirty years in Nova Scotia, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jocelyne Alloucherie</span> Canadian sculptor and academic

Jocelyne Alloucherie, is a Canadian sculptor who explores the relationships between sculpture, architecture and photography through installations.

Bill Vazan is a Canadian artist, known for land art, sculpture, painting and photography. His work has been exhibited in North America and internationally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis-Philippe Hébert</span> Canadian sculptor

Louis-Philippe Hébert was a Canadian sculptor. He is considered one of the best sculptors of his generation.

Ron Terada is a Vancouver-based artist working in various media, including painting, photography, video, sound, books, and graphic design.

Althea Thauberger is a Canadian visual artist, film maker and educator. Her work engages relational practices rooted in sustained collaborations with groups or communities through social, theatrical and textual processes that often operate outside the studio/gallery environment. Her varied research-centric projects have taken her to military base, remote societies and institutional spaces that result in performances, films, videos, audio recordings and books, and involve provocative reflections of social, political, institutional and aesthetic power relations. Her recent projects involve an extended engagement with the sites of their production in order to trace broader social and ideological histories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hamilton MacCarthy</span> Canadian sculptor (1846–1939)

Hamilton Thomas Carlton Plantagenet MacCarthy was one of the earliest masters of monumental bronze sculpture in Canada. He is known for his historical sculptures, in particular his Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia (1904) as well as Samuel de Champlain overlooking Parliament Hill on Nepean Point, Ottawa (1915), next to the National Gallery of Canada. His monument to the Ottawa volunteers who died in the South African War (1902) was moved to Confederation Park in 1969 after several moves. Other works include that of Ottawa mayor, Samuel Bingham, in Notre-Dame Cemetery in Vanier.

Ursula Johnson is a multidisciplinary Mi’kmaq artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her work combines the Mi’kmaq tradition of basket weaving with sculpture, installation, and performance art. In all its manifestations her work operates as didactic intervention, seeking to both confront and educate her viewers about issues of identity, colonial history, tradition, and cultural practice. In 2017, she won the Sobey Art Award.

Tom Sherman is an American-Canadian artist working in video, audio, radio, performance, sculpture and text/image. He is also a writer of nonfiction and fiction. He is a recipient of Canada's Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. He is a professor of video art at Syracuse University.

Roland Poulin is a Canadian contemporary sculptor whose work is characterized by its horizontality and weightiness. He has lived in Sainte-Angèle-de-Monnoir, Quebec, since 1986.

References

  1. 1 2 Tippett 2017, p. 226.
  2. ↑ Tippett 2017, p. 225.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "John Greer". www.gallery.ca. National Gallery of Canada. Retrieved 20 June 2021.
  4. ↑ Reid, Dennis (2012). A Concise History of Canadian Painting (Third ed.). Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press. p. 345. Retrieved 21 June 2021.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "The Rule of Law is a Reflection of Us All - by John Greer". mcmurtrygardensofjustice.com. McMurtry Gardens of Justice. Retrieved 20 June 2021.
  6. ↑ Shuebrook, Ron (September–October 1987). "John Greer-Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, 1987". Vanguard. 16 (4). Archived from the original on 12 October 2013. Retrieved 5 October 2013.
  7. ↑ John Greer, Thomas Seawell Exhibit at Brookhaven Archived 2008-05-17 at the Wayback Machine
  8. ↑ Hammock, Virgil (3 October 2015). "John Greer Goes retroActive". viedesarts.com. Vie des arts, Automne 2015. Retrieved 22 August 2020.
  9. ↑ "Prizes". Canada Council. Retrieved 15 August 2022.
  10. ↑ "Members since 1880". Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Archived from the original on 26 May 2011. Retrieved 11 September 2013.
  11. ↑ "2009 Winners". Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 31 May 2016.

Bibliography

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.