Melvin Edwards and Deborah Roberts are included in ‘51@51: Collected Works’
Featuring fifty-one artworks by thirty-six prominent artists, group exhibition ‘51 @ 51’ is rennie museum’s final presentation in the historic Wing Sang building. Breaking the museum’s self-imposed rule of not titling its shows, ‘51 @ 51’ references the number of artworks in the exhibition as well as the address of the museum, 51 East Pender Street.
Long recognised for the depth of its collecting style evinced in previous monographic exhibitions, ‘51 @ 51’ demonstrates the breadth of the rennie collection. Selections from acquisitions of the past two decades, including recent additions, illustrate a variety of practices and media that highlight key disciplines in the collection. Thirty-three artists in ‘51 @ 51’ are exhibiting at rennie museum for the first time, some having never before exhibited in Canada.
The presentation examines the nature of painting through the inclusion of more than twenty works that present the medium in both traditional and unexpected forms. rennie collection has long maintained an exploration of the evolution of perspectives in painting. The intentional selection of grandly scaled pieces for this presentation fosters an indulgence in one of the oldest forms of creative expression, and the diverse approaches on display are a reminder of the ways artists have pushed boundaries of applying paint to canvas.
Sculptures throughout the museum galleries, in unexpected interior spaces, and at exterior locations, interspersed with new media works, exemplify rennie collection’s embrace of the plurality of artist expression. The existing installation on Wing Sang’s celebrated rooftop sculpture garden is further enlivened with two new sculptures, infusing expanded voices into conversations about statuary and form.
Exhibited artists include: Adel Abdessemed, Andrea Bowers, Frank Bowling, Nick Cave, Ed Clark, Martin Creed, Melvin Edwards, Derek Fordjour, Bernard Frize, Genevieve Gaignard ,Theaster Gates, Sam Gilliam, Peter Halley, Lauren Halsey, Mary Heilmann, Richard Jackson, Jae Jarrell, Titus Kaphar, Hannah Levy, Glenn Ligon, Morris Louis, Jumana Manna, Kenneth Noland, Albert Oehlen, Ahmet Öğüt, Joe Overstreet, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Deborah Roberts, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Cauleen Smith, Hank Willis Thomas, Brian Tolle, Jonathan Wateridge, Charles White and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
