David Thauberger: Road Trips and Other Diversions

David Thauberger: Road Trips and Other Diversions

May 2 – August 23, 2015

Presented by: Information Services Corporation

Regina-based David Thauberger is a nationally recognized artist best known for his iconic paintings of vernacular architecture. Road Trips & Other Diversions is a retrospective exhibition that provides the first comprehensive overview of this remarkable artist. The exhibition includes paintings, prints and ceramic works produced from 1971 to 2009 drawn from more than 30 public and private collections across Canada. Clusters of prints, ceramics and paintings from the artist’s own collection, ranging from New York Pop art to Chicago Imagism to Saskatchewan folk painting, highlight Thauberger’s process of assimilating visual information through the process of collecting.

The exhibition examines key themes and working processes developed throughout Thauberger’s career of 40-plus years. Combining a keen eye for popular and Prairie idioms with an encyclopedic knowledge of 20th-century art, the artist demonstrates through his work that regional concerns and ambitious international art movements like Modernism need not be opposed. He understands that representing place requires both an insider’s and an outsider’s point of view, and a vision that continually moves between the two.

Thauberger has an uncanny ability to transform the imagery of popular culture–the ordinary and the spectacular–into symbols of places, in much the same way as tourist postcards. Whether in ceramics, patterned watercolours, flocked prints, or taped and stencilled paintings, Thauberger has played with the line between industrial and handmade techniques. Questioning the very nature of representation, his work reeflects both his formal art school training and a rejection of the aesthetic limitations of a strictly fine art approach.

This exhibition is the result of a unique collaboration between the Mendel Art Gallery and MacKenzie Art Gallery, who have organized the exhibition along with a documentary film, publication, website, and related programming.

The Vernacular Man presents a rare, candid portrait of David Thauberger at work in his studio. The film also travels across Saskatchewan with the artist as he re-visits the fading rural architecture that inspired some of his most iconic images. While on this journey he recounts the influences, from the Impressionists to folk artists, that shaped his approach and set him on a never-ending quest to reinterpret memory with images that transcend both place and time.

David Thauberger: Road Trips and Other Diversions is organized and circulated by the Mendel Art Gallery and the MacKenzie Art Gallery and presented in Regina by Information Services Corporation. This project has been made possible in part through a contribution from the Museums Assistance Program, Department of Canadian Heritage.

Image: David Thauberger, Way Out West, 2004, 60.9 x 91.4 cm, acrylic on panel. Private Collection.