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Strong Impressions:  60 Years of Collecting Prints at Remai Modern

Curated by Michelle Jacques, Bevin Bradley and Troy Gronsdahl

In 2016, in response to the Frank and Ellen Remai Foundation’s generous gift of 405 Pablo Picasso linocuts to Remai Modern, Veronica and David Thauberger donated 25 prints by Canadian and international artists to the museum. They specifically selected the works in their gift in response to the Picasso linocuts.

The Thaubergers and the Frank and Ellen Remai Foundation are part of a decades-long print collecting history at Remai Modern and its predecessor, the Mendel Art Gallery. Print collecting began here 60 years ago, when, in 1965, John Climer, the Mendel Art Gallery’s first director, purchased 72 prints by important Canadian artists with the aid of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. These were the first works in the medium to enter the collection.

Between 1965 and the present, Remai Modern’s print collection has grown to include more than 1,400 works. Purchases like Climer’s foundational acquisition have contributed to the strength of the holdings but so has the generosity of astute donors who have directed works from their carefully conceived collections to the museum.

Event/Exhibition meta autogenerated block.

Where

Picasso Gallery

Along with selections from the Thaubergers’ gift, Picasso linocuts donated by the Frank and Ellen Remai Foundation, and examples of Climer’s early purchases, Strong Impressions: 60 Years of Collecting Prints at Remai Modern features works donated by Cheryll Woodbury and Gerald Ferguson. Between 2013 and 2022, Woodbury donated nine works by seminal American artists that had been printed by Charles Ringness at Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida (USF) in the 1970s. In 1986, artist and NSCAD professor Gerald Ferguson donated 27 prints produced in the early 1970s at the famed Lithography Workshop at NSCAD University in Halifax, NS.

Featuring more than 40 prints by an array of Canadian and international artists, including Patrick Caufield, Lesley Dill, Nita Forrest, Elza Mayhew, Kazuo Nakamura, Claes Oldenburg, Molly Privett, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Michael Snow, Pat Steir, Joyce Wieland, and of course, Picasso, Strong Impressions introduces the ways in which curators and donors have worked together over time, directly and indirectly, to build a deep and meaningful print collection.