November 14 to December 21, 2024

Abstract Legacies

Rectangle gallery

Featuring: Paul-Émile Borduas, Jack Bush, Alexander Calder, Sorel Etrog, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Kenzie Kiyooka, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Frank Stella, and Françoise Sullivan

As part of our inaugural exhibitions for The Goldfarb Gallery, we want to reflect on the relevance of the visual arts in defining York University’s identity as an academic institution from its inception and within its holdings. The University’s art collection houses a number of significant abstract works with focused attention on notable Abstract Expressionist and Automatiste artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Paul-Emile Borduas. It also includes abstract sculptures, drawings, and colour field paintings by Alex Calder, Jack Bush, Frank Stella, and Kenneth Noland. These consequential artworks come to the university by an exceptional gift from Joan and Martin Goldfarb, who are avid art collectors, passionately amassing a remarkable collection that establishes their dedication to the arts and understanding of art’s role as integral to society as it both shapes and captures it. In the early 2000s, the Goldfarb’s donation of over 70 artworks marked one of the largest gifts of art received by a Canadian university, acknowledging the importance of art as a pedagogical tool.

The exhibition Abstract Legacies pulls from the University’s collections as a whole to draw this thread out from the academic institution’s vision of itself, breaking from traditional forms of education to embrace new ways of seeing, thinking, and expression. The University’s first art acquisitions corresponded with the opening of the Keele Campus and mirrored these modernist ideals. Noteworthy purchases were geometric abstract prints and paintings by Canadian artists such as painter and poet Roy Kiyooka and painter and musician Yves Gaucher. It also included the purchase of 12 serigraph prints by Hungarian painter Victor Vasarely. Each artist shown here is respected for their experimentation with colour and form: Vasarely, founder of Op Art; Kiyooka, a prominent member of the southern Ontario group of artists Painters Eleven; and Gaucher, known for his geometric and linear surfaces. These abstract artworks set the ground for York University’s distinct self-identification as radically breaking with the stuffy ideals of traditional academics to embrace more experimental and open forms of learning. This methodological transference can also be seen in the campuses’ permanent public artworks. A prime example includes Alex Calder’s Model of Man, a large-scale maquette produced and installed on campus in the late sixties. Soon after came the installation of Hugh LeRoy’s iconic Rainbow and significantly, with the University hosting the 10th International Sculpture Conference in 1978, came the making and installation of Sticky Wicket by Mark di Suvero.

The University’s desire to build a collection of modernist work has only been accomplished thanks to the Goldfarb’s major donation, which made abstraction and Abstract Expressionism a defining stream within the collection as a whole. As we mark the opening of The Goldfarb Gallery, along with the new Visible Vault, we want to present and delineate this important thread in the University’s collection as well as to grow it, opening it up to fill some of the manifest historical racial and gender gaps.