Corkin Gallery

Congratulations Shim-Sutcliffe Architects!

2011-02-05T12:22:00.005-05:00

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the Governor General’s award in architecture Brigitte shim and Howard Sutcliffe for their design of Corkin Gallery. Congratulations Shim-Sutcliffe Architects! The award winning design of Corkin Gallery was noted particularly for it’s “intelligent adaptation of the distillery infrastructure, re-purposing the building to effective ends.”

Visit us at 55 Mill Street, Building 61!

9,000 works, 140 dealers, 30 countries: The art fair goes virtual

2011-01-22T12:21:00.006-05:00

We are pleased to announce our participation in the VIP Art Fair, the worlds first online art fair running from January 22nd - 30th 2011 .

Barbara Astman, Dancing with Che #16, 30, 8 -triptych
Being a perfectionist means, among other things, living in a state of perpetual stress. Yet even the famously finicky Toronto art dealer Jane Corkin admits her stress level has come close to the distress threshold in recent days as she’s prepared for the opening of VIP Art Fair, an unprecedented online-only sale of art by almost 140 prestige galleries from 30 countries.

Sondra Meszaros, Ceremony 4

VIP usually stands for “very important person” and certainly there’ll be some of those at the fair (www.vipartfair.com), which begins Saturday morning and runs 24 hours a day through Jan. 30. In this instance, VIP is short for “viewing in private,” an allusion to the virtual booths the galleries hope customers will visit from the comfort of their ski chalets in Davos and oceanfront homes in Maui. The galleries have paid anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 (U.S.) each for the booths, and Corkin’s is one of them.

The veteran gallerist is the only Canadian dealer in the fair, which has enlisted the participation of some of the biggest names in the international art biz – Larry Gagosian, David Zwirner, Marian Goodman, Bruno Bischofberger, Cheim & Read and Thaddaeus Ropac, among them. Together, they’re posting close to 9,000 works for sale, including 2,300 paintings.

“Do you want to know how many nights I’ve been up to 1:30 uploading stuff and that sort of thing?” she says with a laugh that sounds at once weary and frantic. “And how are we going to run a 24-hour booth? Because this is an international event and there’s going to be clients from Asia, Russia, Europe. We don’t have enough staff to man it! You don’t ever want to be at dinner!”

Still, she admits, “it’s a great privilege to be asked.” The asker was James Cohan, an art dealer with offices in Manhattan and Shanghai who concocted the art fair idea three years ago with Internet entrepreneurs Jonas and Alessandra Almgren. Cohan saw the virtual format as a way for gallerists to show and sell their wares without having to pay the tens of thousands of dollars commanded by actual fairs, not to mention such ancillary costs as shipping, travel, insurance, catering, bar bills and hotel accommodation. Moreover, the fair could attract a new collector demographic: tech-savvy and computer-comfortable, younger, affluent customers.

Corkin says she was invited to come aboard “a long time ago.” But like most dealers – and auctioneers, for that matter – she was wary of selling high-quality art online. Clients, too, wondered about buying work they (or their condition experts) couldn’t inspect physically. “Did I say, ‘What a great idea; I’m in,’ on the first phone call?” Corkin laughs. “No, I did not. Do you want to know how many times they had to call me before I said yes?”

Today, though, Corkin’s a believer. “It’s an incredibly seductive way to look at a lot of interesting art. It’s all in front of you. You can sit in your nice chair with a glass of wine or whatever and have a civilized time of it.”

Entrance to the site is free – but if you’re serious about buying and you haven’t secured an advance invitation from one of the participating galleries, you’ll have to pay $100 – good for the first two days; the fee for the remainder of the fair drops to $20 thereafter – to see the price guides and interact with gallery staff.

Once inside the fair “grounds,” you can click on a gallery to see what’s for sale. There’s a zoom allowing close inspection and multiple viewpoints, plus access to artist CVs, translation services, technical data, videos and studio tours. A humanoid figure appears alongside each art work to indicate scale.

While some stuff will be priced in the mid-four figures, heavy-duty pieces by well-known art stars will also be on the block.

Zurich’s Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, for instance, has a large Jean-Michel Basquiat canvas selling for $5-million; a dog sculpture by Japanese hot-shot Yoshitomo Nara is being offered by New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery for $650,000. Corkin’s wares include works by Barbara Astman, Iain Baxter and Thaddeus Holownia, but of her 90 or so offerings, 70 will be viewable only by “best clients” – the VIPs.

While traditional hands-on collectors are largely expected to browse the event, Corkin notes that some may be sufficiently intrigued to contact her after the fair, maybe even arrange a visit to her space in Toronto’s Distillery District. “I think this is really happening,” she says. “I think this is really 21st century.”

JAMES ADAMS

From Saturday January 22nd 2010 Globe and Mail

IAIN BAXTER& - Walk On

2010-10-23T10:38:00.005-04:00

On until Novemeber 7th, 2010, Corkin presents Walk On, an exhibition of Iain Baxter&'s work

Fahrenheit 450 (Homage to Bradbury and Orwell)
“Fahrenheit 450 (Homage to Bradbury and Orwell)” consists of books and
shoes arranged in an infinity symbol on the floor of the gallery. The work celebrates a society of information exchange and the never-ending quest for knowledge while personifying some of the vehicles of this dialogue.

The Lecture
“The Lecture” recreates an intimate academic setting where eight rows of chairs are playfully adorned with shoes and face a lectern. The work serves as a medium for cultural commentary, and encourages the interaction between audience and artwork.

Photographs & Lightboxes
Informed by the notion of driving as a manifestation of consciousness
in North American culture, the photographs in this exhibition were taken
as BAXTER& travelled throughout Canada and the United States. His
photographic oeuvre functions as a fragmented narrative and establishes
his consuming passion for real-life experiences.

Western Landscape, Pacific National Exhibition, Vancouver, BC 1967

Sign, Highway 17 near Sudbury 1969

August 2010, Flirting with Bling

2010-09-24T16:13:00.000-04:00

Marepe and Iain Baxter&

Flirting with Bling is a fun exhibition that explores notions of culture, beauty and fashion through contemporary and historical artworks. It provides an opportunity for viewers to question how we create and celebrate culture through photography, painting, and installation.

Guy Bourdin

Artist; Marepe, Ramón Serrano, Sharon Switzer, Frank Mädler, Lori Newdick, Grit Schwerdtfeger, Natalie Munk, Roxanne Lowit, Barbara Astman, Ian Baxter&, Sarah Moon, Françoise Sullivan, Erwin Blumenfeld, George Platt Lynes, Edmund Kesting, and Irving Penn.

Nan Goldin

Type Bangala de l'Equateur, Kazimierz Zagorski

Highlights from March 2009 - August 2010

2010-08-24T16:04:00.000-04:00

It has been a long while since we have updated.

This post will contain the highlights from exhibitions from March 2009 – September 22^nd 2010

Barbara Astma, Wonderland Series

September 9 2009 - February 13 2010

There are endless possibilities for narratives within found objects. Astman is fascinated with postcards acting as syntheses between personal memories and a constructed reality. In “On Photography,” Susan Sontag speaks of motives of collecting images from which stories flourish: “To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movie and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store”. Postcards represent a quintessential moment where photography becomes object.

Using digital techniques to position the postcards within negative space, Astman captures the feeling of flipping through stacks; harnessing a tension between motion and stillness. The body of work is about the relationship between the real and the artificial, and how experience can occur through artificial representation of the real.

The idea of collecting is significant, as a collection is a form of record in one’s life. As a child, postcards and encyclopedias made Astman realize there was a larger world outside of her neighborhood. She would stare at the postcard long enough to imagine herself being there, preferring the postcard version of reality. Astman is most interested in the postcards that represent a naive world void of worldly problems.

Pre-digital postcards present an intersection of photography, printmaking, drawing and painting with their heavily re-worked and refined imagery. Photographing these postcards re-enforces the multitude of reproductions that make up popular culture, and the complex and involved relationship contemporary culture has with the past.

Françoise Sullivan -
New Works, Song Series

April 21 2010 - August 10 2010

Mark-making is one of the most essential and elemental acts that an artist may do. The act of making the mark, in Françoise Sullivan’s hand, translates into works that are rich in the poetic gesture and rhythms that are an indispensable part of her vocabulary, regardless of the medium. Her repetitive marks read as the rhythm of breathing, like the trace of a heartbeat across a page, or footsteps across a landscape. In the 1940s, Sullivan was a founding member of the group of artists known as “les Automatistes”. This group consisted of artists from many disciplines: painting, dancing, theatre and set design, poetry, and so on. United by their interest in automatism, the “Automatistes”, far from being a little band of innovators from Québec, had a profound impact on the socio-cultural fabric of Canada, fundamentally shaping who we are now as Canadians.

Globe and Mail Review: David Urban

2009-05-19T16:33:00.008-04:00

Untitled 3, 2009

"In instructive contrast to Tim Lee's presentation of himself for delectation, is this charming exhibition of new works on paper by Toronto-based painter David Urban.

Urban is one of those artists in love with painting. These new paintings are small-format works that consist of numerous variations upon the subject of a four-sided, frame-like shape in juxtaposition to a pink or cream-coloured sphere (with one black spot in it, which lends it an inescapable eye-like feeling).

The frame and the "eyeball" float in a softly spray-painted oval (spray painting is, I think, new for Urban) and the rhapsodic colours of these three items (frame, eyeball, oval) jangled together makes for something akin to a spring bouquet in picture form. Urban's sources are obviously and openly there in the paintings (Philip Guston, perhaps, and, more particularly, Hans Hofmann) and they are unashamedly old-fashioned in feeling. Old-fashioned but delightful. And curiously satisfying, now that they are off the cutting edge and closer to history."

-- Dault, Gary Michael. "A Random Coupling of Poetry and Physics." The Globe and Mail. 18 Apr. 2009: R15.

Iain Baxter& and Interviews

2008-11-01T10:17:00.003-04:00

To coincide with Iain Baxter&'s exhibition of new works, and, at the Corkin Gallery, MAG has featured Iain on the cover of the November issue, with a feature article by editor Monika Burman. Pick it up for free at galleries around Toronto.

Listen to Iain Baxter& discuss his new projects, as well as his early conceptual work, with MAG's Julie Glick here: http://www.massartguide.com/audio/200811_iain_baxter_toronto_on.php

Ryoko Suzuki and Marc Séguin reviewed in current issue of BORDER CROSSINGS

2008-10-05T13:01:00.008-04:00

...Suzuki cleverly turns a Japanese pop culture practice on its head and provides an interesting avenue into understanding the notion of manufactured desire in contemporary Japan. -- Carla Harms

Séguin's figuration broaches abstraction the way Jean-Paul Riopelle's abstraction always broached figuration ... Séguin paints the figure, but invokes and evokes registers of meaning that lie below, above or beyond the ground plane of representation. -- James D. Campbell

Iain Baxter&.update.

2008-09-04T16:45:00.009-04:00

Iain Baxter& has exhibited several new projects this summer in a number of exhibitions, including two European biennales, the Fifth TECOMAH Art Biennale in Jouy-en-Josas, France and Les Ateliers de Rennes, Biennale d'art Contemporain in Rennes, France. At TECOMAH, a biennale that focuses on environmental issues, Baxter& was one of 10 international artists invited to create a site-specific piece in an outdoor park. Baxter&'s piece was a large ampersand, tilted on its side and camoflauged with grass. Read about it here: http://www.tecomah.fr/les-environnementales/les-artistes.asp

For Les Ateliers de Rennes, Baxter& worked with local school children and commercial sandwich company Daunat to create a series of installations based on the humble sandwich. The project, titled &WICHTIME, resulted in a humourous series of works that deconstruct the sandwich and re-insert it into unusual contexts. The sandwich becomes anything: a landscape, a bedroom, a piece of sports equipment, shoes. Find out more here: http://www.lesateliersderennes.fr/site/expositions_artistes.php?id=53&id_lieu=7&id_langue=2&PHPSESSID=216ff5fb3f042a64401a3f3342374013

Baxter& and the N.E. Thing Co., are the subject of a recent video discussion by Crown Point Press director Kathan Brown. In casual conversation with the viewer she discusses how artists often act as precursors to pop culture trends, even if the trends appear decades later. You can watch it here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8196280233303142094&hl=en

Baxter&'s exhibition Passing Through continues to tour museums and art galleries throughout Canada with a recent stop at the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon. Passing Through contains early photographs and lightboxes from 1958 through to 1983. Revealing Baxter&'s ongoing interest in the everyday, these photographs also act as a unique document of North American culture in the last half of the 20th century.

For more information on Iain Baxter& please visit http://www.corkingallery.com/

Globe and Mail Review: Thaddeus Holownia

2008-06-21T16:04:00.002-04:00

Now Magazine's Must see: Ryoko Suzuki

2008-06-21T15:16:00.003-04:00

Grit Schwerdtfeger: National Post, March 27, 2008

2008-03-29T14:56:00.009-04:00

Grit Schwerdtfeger: Now Toronto March, 2008

2008-03-29T14:13:00.002-04:00

Grit Schwerdtfeger: Zoom article

2008-03-29T14:10:00.005-04:00

R ead the rest of the article:

Presence of Portraits: Globe and Mail, March 8, 2008

2008-03-29T13:59:00.006-04:00

Presence of Portraits: Toronto Star February, 2008

2008-03-29T13:56:00.003-04:00

Grit Schwerdtfeger: Distanz 2006 March 8

2008-03-15T10:23:00.000-04:00

“Cheerful, melancholy and frequently laconic, Grit Schwerdtfeger balances her art on the threshold between anticipation and memory.” - Kristina Tieke

The photographs of German artist Grit Schwerdtfeger are enigmatic, distanced meditations on everyday places, landscapes and sites of social engagement. Proudly presented at the Corkin Gallery, the images in Schwerdtfeger's body of work Distanz 2006 reveal the unusual beauty of familiar public spaces. Balanced, symmetrical and controlled, to the point of near abstraction in some images, these serene, harmonious scenes belie the often chaotic nature of tourist and recreational sites.

Schwerdtfeger distances herself from her subject matter by employing a central perspective and rigidly controlled composition, in effect removing any specificity of place or time. The viewer is left to contemplate the somewhat troubled relationship between human activity and the domesticated landscape.

Born in Berlin, Schwerdtfeger completed her studies at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, where she currently lives; her work is included in corporate and private collections in England, France, Austria, Belgium, Germany and Canada.

Presence of Portraits Extended until April 27th

2008-02-22T17:01:00.000-05:00

Due to increased demand, Presence of Portraits has been extended until April 27. The exhibition provides the public with a rare opportunity to see 80 original prints by some of the greatest photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Showcasing images of famous writers, musicians and artists, the exhibit examines portraiture as a representation of identity, with a particular focus on the emergence of modernism in 1920s and ‘30s Europe.

Early works in the show include an 1856 portrait by Julia Margaret Cameron of playwright Henry Taylor and an introspective image of Victor Hugo, 1852, made by his son Charles Hugo while exiled in Jersey. Playfully exploring unconventional representation, Dadaist and Surrealist works include Sophie Tauber Arp’s self-portrait behind her Dada head, Raoul Ubac’s mannequin portrait, a quietly poised Salvador Dali by Horst P. Horst and a grotesquely disproportioned portrait by Dora Maar, the muse of Pablo Picasso and inspiration for his Guernica.

Famous Ukrainian cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, in a work by Germaine Krull, is pictured at his last concert in Monte Carlo, before leaving Europe with Toscanini and Horowitz for the Metropolitan in New York City. Described by some as the greatest string player of his time, this portrait shows an intimate, pensive Piatigorsky on the eve of his departure. Edward Weston’s striking portrait of Imogen Cunningham, the experimental self-portraits of André Kertész and the street documentaries of Walker Evans and Paul Strand are all outstanding examples of modernist photography.

Mid-century American works consist of both the taste-defining fashion photography of Richard Avedon, Erwin Blumenfeld and Francesco Scavullo as well as the social documentary explorations of Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus and Lisette Model. Contemporary artists in the exhibit, including Barbara Astman and Lori Newdick, investigate issues of gender, identity and transformation that reflect upon the work of earlier women photographers, such as Claude Cahun's Portrait of Suzanne Malherbe.

The Presence of Portraits

2008-02-08T13:10:00.000-05:00

On Now. The Presence of Portraits featuring works of over 80 established artists from North America and Europe. The Corkin Gallery is proud to present unique works by Brancusi, Andre Kertesz, Diane Arbus and many others.

Exhibition runs until April 27.

Getty Museum Acquires Penn Photographs

2008-02-08T12:40:00.000-05:00

from www.artinfo.com

The J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired Irving Penn’s most
extensive body of work, The Small Trades, a set of 252 full-length
portraits of tradespeople in natural lighting taken in 1950 and 1951.

The museum plans to exhibit the portraits in September of 2009, displaying
the set in its entirety for the first time. Getty Director Michael Brand
said the museum will "fulfill Mr. Penn’s hopes of keeping the collection
intact and displaying it as a whole work."

One of the most important living photographers, Penn photographed 215
subjects from London, New York, and Paris for the project. It started as an
assignment for Vogue to photograph workers in Paris during the summer of
1950, and he returned to it over many decades to produce ever more exacting
prints.

The acquisition will add to the Getty's collection of portrait photography
and complement a major exhibition of 20th-century German photographer
August Sander's work that will be mounted in May.