Rewind: Alex Livingston
Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax
The Halifax-based painter and NSCAD professor Alex Livingston graduated from art school and launched his practice during NSCAD's "...late Conceptual period, when taking up a paintbrush carried the weight of a counter-revolutionary act," writes Susan Gibson Garvey, the director and curator of Dalhousie Art Gallery, in her catalogue essay to this survey exhibition spanning 20 years.
Indeed, the figurative and representational painting produced by the likes of Livingston in the early and mid-1980s brought the ire of critics such as Benjamin Buchloh; Livingston, a student at the time, had defenders too, such as the late John Clark. While it's not necessary to defend Livingston today, this expansive exhibition seems to shout one message: in the right hands, the achievements of painting are limitless.
The sheer number of works here—more than 60 in the show, including working drawings and sketchbook pages—makes an immediate impact. The eye darts among vastly different forms and images, surface sizes, colours, lines. Livingston's concern with the multiplicity and interconnectivity of the natural world—that is, with what is natural to our world and our existence every day (animals, plants, humans, objects, cells, the cosmos)—ties it all together.
Starting with an early neo-expressionist work, Haven (1985), which once appeared on the cover of Nova Scotia's phone book (how infuriating for Livingston's critics!), the show is presented chronologically. Text panels signposting the evolution of Livingston's art from period to period could have helped underscore the startling diversity of the works in the show. (A single panel appears as an overview near Haven.)
The works on the walls, however, speak for, and among, themselves. A wall painted deep red is the background for selections from Livingston's fauna series, A History of Four-footed Beasts and Other Curiosities (1997-9), which was inspired by the work of Edward Topsell, a 17th-century British zoologist. The antiquated bestiary hangs across from Livingston's "biomorphic" canvases, which show us microscopic views of an organism's cellular energy. Livingston has also drawn from 18th- and 19th-century nautical engravings to produce the Water Land Paintings Series 2 (2001-2).
The current works, from 2004-5, are black, grey and white abstracts of mingling lines. In their spontaneous and considered gestures, varying paint thicknesses and tonal range, they echo the biomorphic creations. Both are good examples of what Gibson Garvey calls the "teeming" quality of Livingston's practice.
Summer 2005
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