For the Love of It:
Paintings by John Clark, Harold Klunder and David Urban
February 20 – March 20

This exhibition features works from various periods of each of the artist’s careers and makes evident a level of critical inquiry and interest in painting’s history; the exhibition represents their commitment to the medium and their belief in the
fullness of its possibilities as an expressive medium.
During the course of a career encompassing more than 20 years of devotion to painting, John Clark (1943 – 1989) sought to question the possibilities that the tradition of painting could afford by reinvesting the language of abstraction with an
essential humanizing force. The characteristic synergy in Clark’s work is exemplified in “Ramifications and Matisse’s Eye”; this large scale painting, currently on view, resonates as a record of John Clark’s dialogue between abstraction and the realm of the natural. In this work, the artist’s unique style, characterized by a multilayered interplay of hand drawn staccato like line work or mark making, ultimately confronts viewers through its visceral qualities.
While characteristically unique, the work of both David Urban and Harold Klunder continues to advance the language of abstraction. Their works represent a reconsideration of the formal possibilities of paint as an expressive medium in which varying discourses on the history of painting, literature, and language surface. The gravity of their works have garnered a range of critical reception: The art critic James Campbell describes Klunder’s paintings as, “carnivorous and incarnate, seemingly inchoate but possessed of deep symbolic order – with a fragmented folklore of painting’s past and perhaps a portent of its future…”. Campbell’s poetic description resonates through two key pieces in the TrépanierBaer exhibition:“Sleep and Poetry” and “Crucible”.
David Urban is one of a new generation of painters who have rekindled interest in the genre of abstract painting by imparting the historic undercurrents of modernism through a dialogue with painting’s past.His paintings, for which he has become well known, represent a form of cultural theorizing that seeks to challenge the parameters of abstraction; they are the outward expression of a complex process through which he articulates a considered reading of painting’s history.Transfiguring the historic sediment churned up through an intellectually rigorous dialogue, Urban’s wholly renewed compositions impart a new vitality to the tradition of painting.

For more information please contact Yves Trépanier or Kevin Baer at (403) 244-2066, or email info@tbg1.com