Murray Laufer
"Murray Laufer" by Stephen Weir, Winter 2006, pp. 92-93
It is fitting that Murray Laufer’s first public retrospective would take place at the Art Gallery of Ontario while the gallery is in the bare-bones midst of another renovation period. Skin and bones are Laufer’s inspiration, and his installation ran last summer when the gallery stood exposed to the elements, with its skin flayed and its steel ribs showing.
Working with gobs of red paint, plastic bones and hunks of hair, Laufer makes three-dimensional paintings and collages that hover between the slaughterhouse and divinity. The exhibition included five seven-foot-high, three-dimensional paintings created between the mid-1980s and the present and nine charcoal portrait drawings created between 1980 and 1990.
Over the past five decades Laufer has sometimes destroyed the art he has created, saving just seven major works and some four dozen drawings. The show hung in an octagonal room that looked more like the nave of a church or a temple than a public space. A crucified man (A Descent from a Cross) faced the open doorway. Laufer’s crucifixion speaks of pathos and futility, not forgiveness and hope. He is one of Canada’s foremost set designers, and his assemblages have that sense of drama one usually associates with art on a different set of boards.
Laufer graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1952 and has designed productions for the Stratford Festival, the Canadian Opera Company, the Shaw Festival, the Banff Centre and the long-running stage version of Anne of Green Gables in Charlottetown. Canadians know him because of his inspired set designs; these shocking interpretations of dissected carcasses and the human form are an equally remarkable and unforgettable manifestation of his vision.
The curator David Moos notes that “Laufer uses diverse media such as collage, painting, drawing and assemblage—art objects created by three-dimensional found materials—to build sculptural additions on the canvas. His technique is methodical and intensely detailed, creating three-dimensional works with thick impasto on the canvas.” The paint in Carcass III has been applied so thickly that it has dripped down the canvas and melded with an acrylic rib cage that breaks out into the air. Here and there Laufer has daintily striated the bones with red paint. The life those ribs guarded and supported left the gallery long ago, but the marriage of art and collage has added another dimension that cannot be erased—Laufer’s work presents the human body with soul intact.
Three of Laufer’s works depict a butchered bovine carcass, reminiscent of Rembrandt, Soutine and Francis Bacon; the open body cavities appear translucent and glow under the gallery lights. This show may have been Laufer’s Art Gallery of Ontario debut, but its impact will be lasting: four of the paintings will remain with the gallery as part of the permanent collection.
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