TORONTO.- The Art Gallery of Ontario announced an extraordinary gift of contemporary artworks from the Estate of Philip B. Lind. A tremendous supporter of Canadian artists and museums, these 37 works are from the late Phil Lind’s personal collection and span the spectrum of his collecting interests between the years 2002-2023. Featuring artworks by 24 Canadian and international artists including photographs, lightboxes, sculptures, paintings, drawings and editions, the gift will go on view this fall in the new exhibition Light Years: The Phil Lind Gift.

“Phil Lind was a leader.” says Stephan Jost, Michael and Sonja Koerner Director, and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario. “While well recognized for his work in the business world, he was positively progressive in his taste of Contemporary Art. He acquired very selectively and of the highest quality. He was most passionate about Canadian artists who are globally known, such as Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Stan Douglas and Philip Guston. He also collected art by some of the most important contemporary artists such as William Kentridge, John McCracken and Ai Weiwei. Phil’s gift to the AGO is a reflection of the quality and depth of his character.”

Among the largest gifts of contemporary art in the AGO’s history, the Phil Lind gift includes key works by Vancouver school artists Roy Arden, Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham and Jeff Wall, and will considerably bolster the AGO’s holdings by these renowned artists. The gift arrives at a significant moment for the AGO, as construction continues on the Dani Reiss Modern & Contemporary Gallery, a 40,000 sq. foot expansion designed to showcase the AGO’s growing collection of Modern & Contemporary Art.

“Art brought our father great pleasure. A lifelong advocate for contemporary and modern art at the AGO, his support for exhibitions, acquisitions and the forthcoming Dani Reiss Modern & Contemporary Gallery was fueled by his personal and professional conviction that organizations thrive through great programming,” says Jed Lind, Phil Lind’s son. “It is thus fitting that he left the most significant works in his collection to the AGO for their new expansion and for the public at large to enjoy and consider. It is the hope of my sister, Sarah, and I that this gift will encourage other private collectors to follow in his footsteps. With this our family hopes to inspire others.”

The gift includes artworks by Roy Arden, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Chris Burden, Andrew Dadson, Thomas Demand, Stan Douglas, William Eggleston, Antony Gormley, Rodney Graham, Andrew Grassie, Philip Guston, William Kentridge, John Massey, John McCracken, Julian Opie, Bettina Pousttchi, Thomas Ruff, Allan Sekula, Laurie Simmons, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jeff Wall, Christopher Williams and Erwin Wurm.

Established in 2016 to support emerging artists working with photography, film, and video, the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize at The Polygon Gallery in Vancouver reflects Phil Lind’s own personal and family connections to British Columbia. This fall, in tandem with the Phil Lind Gift to the AGO, The Polygon Gallery proudly announces a new $1 million endowment from the Lind estate that will increase the value of the Prize and henceforth be awarded every two years. With this move, the prize becomes one of this country’s most significant.

Opening Nov. 1, 2024, in the Signy Eaton Gallery on level 2 of the AGO, Light Years: The Phil Lind Gift will feature 29 works from the Phil Lind Gift, alongside a selection of artworks previously donated to the AGO, as well as loans from the Estate of Philip B. Lind and a Ron Terada sculpture, Entering City of Vancouver (2002) generously on loan from the Vancouver Art Gallery. Curated by Adam Welch, the AGO’s Associate Curator of Modern Art, the exhibition highlights Lind’s lifelong interest in social and political histories.

“These works of art were Lind’s companions but are by no means casual or easy ones. Many are provocations,” Adam Welch, Associate Curator, Modern Art, AGO. “A catalytic gift for the AGO’s collection of modern and contemporary art, these artworks warrant the same attention and slow looking he paid them throughout his life.”

An enthusiastic supporter of what has since come to be known as the Vancouver school of conceptual photography, the exhibition features works by noted Vancouver-born artists Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham, Ron Terada and Jeff Wall. Opening with Graham’s irreverent diptych Media Studies ‘77 (2016), the exhibition includes five works by Jeff Wall, including Steves Farm, Steveson (1980), his first major landscape photograph and the impressive light box River Road, Richmond, B.C. in Winter River (1997).

Monuments to time and place that are equally monumental in scale, Stan Douglas’s photographs restage the past, figuratively and literally. Abbot & Cordova, 7 August 1971 (2008), captures the Gastown Riots that shook Vancouver in 1971. Meanwhile in MacLeod’s Books, Vancouver (2008), Douglas, precarious stacks of used books offer cluttered antidote to the modernist aesthetics seen elsewhere in the exhibition.

The exhibition also features the work of noted contemporary and historical photographers, Andrew Dadson, Thomas Ruff, Allan Sekula and Wolfgang Tillmans. Two works by the pioneering photographer William Eggleston, an early adopter of colour photography, are also featured, Untitled (Young Boy in Red Sweater) and Untitled (Summer, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in Background), both from 1971.

Lind was introduced to the work of Antony Gormley, Julian Opie, and Philip Guston in 2005, and continued to engage with their work throughout his life. Drawn to the work of Canadian-American painter and printmaker Philip Guston for his complex readings of American history and race relations in the 1960s and 70s, the exhibition features four paintings and eight drawings. The works on paper feature his characteristic hood imagery, as he considered the banality of evil in the guise of the Klu Klux Klan. The major painting, 1979’s Untitled (Head), with its upward gaze and melancholy use of red, made in the year before the artists death, is thought to be a self-portrait.

A counterpoint to these paintings, photographs and works on paper are four sculptural works. Acknowledging Lind’s own emotional attachments to Vancouver’s artistic landscape, Ron Terada’s illuminated road sign Entering City of Vancouver (2002) stands in the middle of the exhibition, situating viewers geographically.

Consisting of vertically stacked cubes made from two-inch-thick concrete, Room II (1987) by Antony Gormley, is a piece of architecture, a cell whose dimensions correlate directly to his own body. Nearby stands Gormley’s life-size cast-iron human figure, Another Time X (2008), again modeled on his own body. Gormley has previously described these solitary forms as "an attempt to bear witness to what it is like to be alive and alone in space and time".

Lind met Ai Weiwei, in Beijing in 2012, when the artist was still under house arrest and was struck by his personal courage. A shallow platter installed close to the ground, Ai’s Marble Plate (2010) features carved grooves resembling a cerebral cortex — an allusion to the brain injury sustained by Ai in 2009 following a violent assault by police.