Murray Favro | |
---|---|
Born | Murray Favro December 24, 1940 Huntsville, Ontario, Canada |
Education | H.B. Beal Technical and Commercial School |
Known for | Sculptor |
Movement | London Regionalism |
Murray Favro RCA (born December 24, 1940) is a Canadian sculptor who lives in London, Ontario. His work that includes drawing, sculpture, performance and installation, often incorporating slide and film projections, lighting effects, computer and electronic technology. He is associated with London Regionalism.
Favro's work deals with the nature of perception, reality and art itself, as well as with the insistent presence of the machine environment. [1] He is an important figure among a significant generation of artists – Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe and Ron Martin among them – who became active in that city in the early 1960s and drew national attention as the London Regional School of artists. He is also well known as a founding member of the Nihilist Spasm Band. [2]
As a teenager he moved to London where, from 1958 to 1962, he studied at H.B. Beal Technical and Commercial School, after which he enrolled in the specialized art classes offered at Beal (at the time, one of the few training schools for artists in Canada). Early on, he showed an interest in machines of all kinds, an interest that was encouraged by an uncle who was a tinkerer and inventor.
Favro began his career painting brightly coloured works on masonite. A Canada Council Arts Bursary in 1970 allowed him to devote himself to quit painting to pursue his other interests – guitars, machines, airplanes, and experiments with film images and inventions. [3] That year he developed his first successful "projected reconstruction", in which images on a slide are projected onto their wooden, white, life-sized counterparts, giving them colour, detail and identity.
The formative years of Favro’s practice in the 1960s were marked by a growing desire to collapse the boundaries between art and life. In contrast to Andy Warhol’s Factory led the American Pop Art movement of the period, Favro resisted the mass-produced image and object. He was determined instead to build, even replicate, his own 'things' from the materials at hand, repurposing the readymade and reasserting the relationship between object and maker. [4]
Significant works over the course of his eclectic career include "projected paintings" such as Country Road (1971–72), Synthetic Lake (1972–73) and Van Gogh’s Room (1973–74), reconstructions such as Sunlight on Table and Floor (1990) and Hydro Pole (1995–96), and a series of drawings and mechanically-improvised constructions of flying machines, their parts and hand tools, that include Sabre Jet, 55% Size (1979–83) and Air Compressor and Turbine (1996–97). [1] [4]
Favro's work has been acquired for numerous public galleries and countless private collections across Canada, and has twice been the focus of comprehensive exhibitions, organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario (1983) and collaboratively by the former London Regional Art and Historical Museums and the McIntosh Gallery (1998), University of Western Ontario. In 1977 he received the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (1987). [5] In 1997, he received the Gershon Iskowitz Award for career achievement. He is a 2007 recipient of the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. He is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. [6]
Favro is represented by the Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto.
Greg Curnoe was a Canadian painter known for his role in the Canadian art movement labeled London Regionalism, which, beginning in the 1960s, made London, Ontario, an important centre for artistic production in Canada. While his oeuvre chronicled his daily experience in a variety of media, it was grounded in twentieth-century art movements, especially Dada, with its emphasis on nihilism and anarchism, Canadian politics, and popular culture. He is remembered for brightly coloured works that often incorporate text to support his strong Canadian patriotism, sometimes expressed as anti-Americanism, as well as his activism in support of Canadian artists.
John Richard Chambers was an artist and filmmaker. Born in London, Ontario, Chambers' painting style shifted from surrealist-influenced to photo-realist-influenced. He used the term "Perceptual Realism" and later "perceptualism" to describe his style. He began working with film in the 1960s, completing six by 1970. Stan Brakhage proclaimed Chambers' The Hart of London as "one of the greatest films ever made."
Ronald Langley Bloore, D.Litt LL. D. FRSC was a Canadian abstract artist and teacher. He was a member of the Regina Five.
The Nihilist Spasm Band (NSB) is a Canadian noise band formed in 1965 in London, Ontario. The band was founded by Hugh McIntyre, John Clement, John Boyle, Bill Exley, Murray Favro, Archie Leitch, Art Pratten, and Greg Curnoe. Leitch has since retired, Curnoe was struck and killed by a pickup truck while cycling in 1992, and McIntyre died of heart failure in 2004. The band members are mostly local artists. They were one of the artists named on the Nurse with Wound list. They have also been cited as an influence on Sonic Youth, Negativland and Einstürzende Neubauten.
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a hard step for the art loving public to take, not to have the red look like a side of a barn but to let it be the red for its own sake and how it exists in the environment of that canvas.
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Canadian art refers to the visual as well as plastic arts originating from the geographical area of contemporary Canada. Art in Canada is marked by thousands of years of habitation by Indigenous peoples followed by waves of immigration which included artists of European origins and subsequently by artists with heritage from countries all around the world. The nature of Canadian art reflects these diverse origins, as artists have taken their traditions and adapted these influences to reflect the reality of their lives in Canada.
Gershon Iskowitz was a Canadian artist of Jewish background originally from Poland. Iskowitz was a Holocaust survivor of the Kielce Ghetto, who was liberated at Buchenwald. The circumstances of his early life—the trauma of the Holocaust and the uncertainty of the immediate postwar period, followed by immigration and adaptation to Canada—provide a lens through which to understand and appreciate his work. His early figurative images represent his tragic observed and remembered experiences while his later luminous abstract works represent his own unique vision of the world. Iskowitz's work does not easily fit into contemporary schools and movements, but it has been characterized as hard-edge, minimalist, abstract expressionist, and action painting.
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The H.B. Beal Secondary School is a high school in London, Ontario. It is named after Herbert Benson Beal, the founder and first principal of the school. H.B. Beal is the second largest school in Thames Valley District School Board with almost 2,000 students currently enrolled as of 2019/20. The school property sits on almost two whole city blocks in downtown London. The actual building sits on one, while the other block is used for parking and the Athletics field including a football field and a track.
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