LIZ MAGOR

Liz Magor is one of the most important Canadian artists of her generation and certainly its most influential sculptor of the past thirty years. Born in 1948 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Magor lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she has also had a distinguished teaching career at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

This non-chronological survey will focus on sculpture and installation produced over the course of forty years. The show will emphasize the thematic and emotional range of Magor’s practice. From the mental and physical contexts of retail consumerism to the spaces of the museum to the private, interior worlds of addiction and desire, Magor’s oeuvre has consistently combined a high level of conceptual and procedural rigor with the intense investigation of materials, ranging from twigs and textiles to rubber and polymerized gypsum. The exhibition will alternate in terms of scale, shifting between displays that are monumental and sprawling on the one hand, to intimate and personal on the other. Indeed, it will focus on the richly layered nature of Magor’s practice—extraordinary in its tendency to meld multiple references to cultures of display, compulsion, and consumption, making the case that this visual and emotional richness is one of the reasons why Magor is one of the most intriguing conceptual artists of her generation.