TORONTO.- This fall at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto artist Brian Groombridge (b. 1953) opened a solo exhibition of prints and sculptures from 1989-2021. Brian Groombridge: New Models for Measurement is curated by the AGO’s Associate Curator of Canadian Art, Renée van der Avoird and features six new acquisitions, alongside loans from the artist's studio and a private collection.
Born in Sarnia, Ontario, Groombridge has applied a poetic, philosophical approach to human knowledge systems since he started his artistic practice in the 1970s. Inspired by cosmology, geography and art history, he often references tools from graphic design, carpentry, and surveying in his prints, sculptures and installation works. Featuring 12 works made between 1989-2021, New Models for Measurement is Groombridge’s first-ever solo exhibition at the AGO. The works gathered here highlight the artist’s enduring belief in the mutability of knowledge and perception: how phenomena we assume to be static are in fact fluid and transient.
On view in Galleries 140 and 141 on Level 1, New Models for Measurement is a concise survey of Groombridge’s career. “His reductive aesthetic is at once playful and conceptually rich. Always keeping the viewer in mind, Groombridge reveals poetry through detail and precision,” says Renée van der Avoird, Associate Curator of Canadian Art. “As an artist who works fluidly across various media, from painted aluminum sculptures to delicate letterpress prints, Groombridge contributes to our understanding of how conceptualism and minimalism come alive in Canada today. He reflects on moments of history in a way that is both beautiful and profound, turning his attention to the unseen, the peripheral, and the potential that lies in liminal spaces. We are so pleased to celebrate the addition of six new works by this remarkable Toronto artist to the collection.”
One of the newly acquired works is, dd/mm/yyyy (2015), an elongated sculpture made of painted industrial aluminum. Installed in a corner, the piece sutures two gallery walls together, as though it might simultaneously hold the gallery space together and stretch it further. In essence, dd/mm/yyyy is a three-dimensional rendering of a surveyor's line, a tool used to indicate a fixed length; it is mounted flush to the wall and stretches more than four meters in length. It is marked every 18 ¾ inches, a non-standard measurement, precisely observed and measured.
Another recent acquisition, the silkscreen, Two Views of a Past (1992), juxtaposes a print of Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance Adam and Eve (a work in the AGO Collection) with the stark geometry of Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive apartments in Chicago. This pairing of images carries an unusual synergy and the graph paper in the background references such systems of knowledge as mathematics and geometry.
The earliest work in the show is Comets Tell of Great Distances Travelled (1989), also a new acquisition to the AGO’s collection, is a suite of five prints that marks when Halley’s Comet most recently appeared. As a phenomenon, Halley’s Comet takes place independent of human events but intersects with history through association with events such as wars and disasters. Here, characteristically, Groombridge challenges our understanding of continuous time, symbolic associations, historic references, and ultimately, knowledge systems that hold our ideas and beliefs.
Brian Groombridge is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, and printmaking. Born in 1953 in Sarnia, Ontario, Groombridge attended Sheridan College in 1972, and the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) from 1974 to 1978. His work has been presented across Canada and abroad at venues including Het Apollohuis, Eindhoven; Cold City Gallery, Toronto; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Plug In ICA, Winnipeg; and The Power Plant, Toronto. His work has been collected by various public institutions including Art Gallery of Hamilton; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; Museum London; Vancouver Art Gallery; and numerous private collections. He is represented by the Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto.
