David Thauberger: Road Trips & other diversions
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 and drawn from more than 30 public and private collections across Canada. 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 reflects both his formal art school training and a rejection of the aesthetic limitations of a strictly fine art approach.
Sandra Fraser, Associate Curator at the Mendel Art Gallery, and Timothy Long, Head Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Organized and circulated by the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon and the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina. This project is funded in part by the Museums Assistance Program at Canadian Heritage.
