"Europe's Most Acclaimed Artists: Wim Delvoye and Daniel Richter"
2004-03-27 until 2004-05-23
Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
Toronto, ON, CA

The Power Plant at Harbourfront Centre, Canada’s leading non-collecting contemporary art gallery, announces three new exhibitions running from March 27 through May 23, 2004: Wim Delvoye: Cloaca – New & Improved, Republic of Love and Daniel Richter: Pink Flag – White Horse. The Power Plant presents two of Europe's most acclaimed artists, Wim Delvoye and Daniel Richter, in their first Canadian exhibitions.

Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s engaging sculpture Cloaca – New & Improved addresses a number of cultural taboos while challenging viewers to consider society's discomfort with digestive functions and to question the elaborate cultural mechanisms constructed to keep those functions hidden. The forty foot machine - comprised of metal casing, glass beakers, tubes and enzymes - duplicates the human digestive system through the daily riutal of feeding and defecating. Cloaca can be seen as a cyborg-like hybrid of man and machine directly confronting the contemporary state of confusion of when and where human life begins, and ends. Accompanying the Wim Delvoye: Cloaca - New & Improved sculpture are 27 preparatory drawings for the original Cloaca. For more information on Cloaca and Wim Delvoye visit http://www.cloaca.be

Born in rural Flanders in 1965, Wim Delvoye lives and works in Ghent. He has had numerous one-person international exhibitions at venues including Paris' Centre Georges Pompidou and at MUHKA in Antwerp. He was a participating artist at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999) and Documenta IX (1992). The Power Plant’s presentation of Wim Delvoye: Cloaca - New & Improved, curated by Adjunct Curator Nancy Campbell, marks the first exhibition of this notable artist’s work in Canada.

Republic of Love tests the waters of 21st century notions of desire, love and longing with new work by Toronto-based artists Shary Boyle, Jay Isaac, Paul P. and Tony Romano. In the age of Internet dating and reality television, how is our concept of love evolving? Are the dramatic global events of today bringing on a re-birth of the “make love, not war” approach of the 1960s? The artists’ methods of expression and focus in this exhibition vary quite broadly: Boyle’s watercolour, ink and gouache works examine the psychosexual complexities and social phobias of intimacy; Paul P.’s paintings and drawings are based on images of young men in gay pornographic magazines published in the pre-AIDS 1970s and early 1980s; Isaac explores the idea of love as an emergence from a mired landscape into a futuristic, alien utopia through a series of Dali-esque paintings and a large scale sculpture; Romano’s work looks at the labyrinthine structures of relationships in two installation works involving video, lighting effects and computer software. The exhibition is organized by Xandra Eden, Assistant Curator.

Berlin-based artist Daniel Richter has achieved a notable reputation, especially in Europe, for his abstract paintings of the last decade. In the last five years he has garnered a heightened level of critical attention with the emergence of his large-scale quasi-surrealist works for which he employs an expansive archive of found images that include reproductions of artworks, book covers, film stills, newspaper clippings, comics and record album covers. Daniel Richter: Pink Flag – White Horse presents an important selection of recent paintings which brings revisionist politics, history painting and the impact of violence and fear in popular culture in the media, into sharp focus.

Born in Germany in 1962, Richter has been included in numerous exhibitions, including recent shows at NBK - Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. This is Richter’s first museum exhibition in North America. Co-organized by Wayne Baerwaldt, Director; Kitty Scott, Curator of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Scott Watson, Director/Curator, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. The exhibition is accompanied by a colour catalogue with an introduction by the curators, an artist interview, a text by Chicks on Speed, and documentation of recent paintings.

IMAGE
Wim Delvoye
Cloaca - New & Improved, 2001.
Mixed media
2x10x0.75 metres
Installation view: Migros Museum, Zürich (2001).
Courtesy of the Artists.
Photo: Wim Van Egmond, Rotterdam.

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