Micah Lexier: Lives & Works 3. Live with Less
February 10 through March 10, 2007

TrépanierBaer is pleased to present an exciting new exhibition of works by Canadian artist Micah Lexier, titled Lives & Works, an evolving body of conceptual work that documents thoughts and images from the artist’s personal and professional life. The exhibition marks Lexier’s tenth anniversary with TrépanierBaer and features works in laser-cut steel and letterpress prints on handmade Japanese paper.

The core of the show consists of works from Lexier’s Revelation Series, scribbled thoughts written with the artist’s left hand that are later obliterated with his right hand. These drawings conflate the artist’s mark of creation with its obliteration, generating a surprising tension between legibility and concealment. By attempting to erase his private thoughts, Lexier creates a kind of secrecy that lends power to his original thought. “It’s not the thing that you make public, it’s the thing that you hide…everyone wants the secret,” says the artist. Rendered in laser-cut steel, the images produce a double capture of their moment of making–both in the artist’s writing and the marks resulting from processing the steel.

Lexier takes these revelations one step further with his Unique Combinations, Revelation Series, which consist of letterpress prints made on handmade Japanese Mura Koban paper. Playing with the notion of difference and sameness, Lexier positions various combinations of the Revelation images, one image right-side up and the other right-side down, to create 110 unique prints.

Yet another revelation in the show is entitled Yves’ Diagram, a self-referential work that refers to the planning of the exhibition itself. Lexier uses a diagram made by Yves Trépanier as a “metadrawing,” and then builds on it to create Calculating Yves’ Diagram. Lexier’s critically acclaimed conceptual work blurs the line between the artist’s public and private life, allowing the viewer glimpses of the artist’s private life in a professional setting.

Micah Lexier was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba and attended the University of Manitoba School of Art, graduating with his BFA Honors in 1982. He pursued graduate studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, completing his MFA in 1984, before moving to Toronto where he lived for several years. Lexier currently lives and works in New York, where the Jack Shainman Gallery represents him. Birch Libralato in Toronto also represents him. Lexier has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions and his work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, The British Museum, and The Art Gallery of Ontario to name a few.