Ivan Eyre: Persona
Ivan Eyre (1935-), Untitled, 1981, Crayon on paper, 75.7 x 53.1 cm, Collection of the Pavilion, Assiniboine Park Conservancy.
Ivan Eyre is one of Canada’s greatest artists and the recipient of the nation’s highest honours. His extensive body of work reaches across media and subject matter with unparalleled originality and proficiency. Also a sculptor and draughtsman, Eyre is most commonly known for his paintings. Through his vast landscapes, still lifes, figurative work, and personal mythologies, his is an art that reflects humanity.
“My work projects that which is ‘essential’ in me and in you, towards our unconditional and unpersuaded selves. It concerns itself with the passage of time and time’s inversion in memory and contemplation. It is preoccupied with the unfolding of life – the contradictions, paradoxes, uncertainties, faith – all the viciousness and the beauty – as in a blizzard, its freezing winds containing with them light, drifting snow flakes.”
– Ivan Eyre
Persona is a selection of Ivan Eyre’s figurative drawings that explore character – known, generated, and perceived. With seeds in German expressionism and cubism, Eyre has developed a unique figurative style that is fluid and poetically rendered. His drawings explore a range of emotions through a masterful choice of weight, tone, colour, texture, and flow. He distils and distorts the figure, creating works that are unapologetically charged with feminine sensuality and strong masculinity.
Ivan Eyre (1935-), Untitled, 1982, Crayon on paper, 75.9 x 55.9 cm. Collection of the Pavilion, Assiniboine Park Conservancy.
Ivan Eyre (1935-), Untitled, 1980, Crayon on paper, 65.7 x 50.8 cm. Collection of the Pavilion, Assiniboine Park Conservancy.
The mask metaphor is a reoccurring theme in Eyre’s oeuvre.* Serving as a guise to protect the self and a refuge from which one can observe the world, a mask also makes possible the creation of an alternative self in the eyes of others. Not often literal in expression, Eyre’s work is typically set in the realm of question and ambiguity, one we are invited to contemplate.
Disclaimer: Please be advised that some of the drawings in this exhibition contain depictions of nudity.
ART TERMINOLOGY: OEUVRE
oeuvre | noun
oeu·vre | \ ˈu̇-vrə
substantial body of work constituting the lifework of a writer, an artist, or a composer.
Did you know?
The Lake of the Woods is a remnant of glacial Lake Agassiz and contains 14 542 islands. The underlying Precambrian bedrock is one of the oldest geological formations on earth.