Masterpieces from the 1980s

at WINCHESTER GALLERIES MODERN
758 Humboldt Street (beside the Marriott)
April 2 – 30, 2011

Special Opening
Saturday April 2, 2011, 2 – 5 p.m.
2:30 – 3:00: ‘Introduction to the Exhibition’ by
the artist’s daughter, Carol Perehudoff, renowned travel writer
3:30 – 4:00: Tzenka Dianova, concert pianist, performs the Victoria premiere of ‘Canto Ostinato,’ a legendary Minimalist work from the 1980s by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt.
Distinguished guest: artist Dorothy Knowles, wife of William Perehudoff

William Perehudoff achieved early success as a mural painter and went on to become an internationally-recognized colour-field artist.  He was born in 1918 in Saskatoon and raised on a farm near the original Doukhobor settlement of Bogdanovka.  He studied with the eminent French muralist Jean Charlot in Colorado Springs in 1948 and with Amédée Ozenfant in New York in 1950-51.

From 1954 to 1978 Perehudoff was an artist/designer at the Modern Press in Saskatoon.  He simultaneously established an important career as a painter. His retirement from the firm allowed more time to explore his art-making.  He tried different mediums like the gels that had recently become available.  Often travelling to major centres, including an extended stay in London, he spent time in museums, galleries and studios.  Since the early 1970s he has been exhibiting in New York, London, and Chicago.

Perehudoff’s earliest style was realistic.  He often used a generalized contour line resonant with that of contemporary social realism and murals.  In the 1950s he continued with realism but often with an accent on such modes as Expressionism and Cubism.  During that decade he also explored a wide range of non-objective styles.

His first colour field series dates from the early 1960s.  It employs hard-edge circles and rectangles.  The hard-edge element and absence of a painterly ground are characteristics of all his 1960s’ series.  In the 1970s, thin stripes on stained backgrounds became his format.  The early to mid 1980s gave rise to his use of thick acrylic gel which lent itself to immediacy because, once applied, there is no rethinking the placement.  He responded with a new calligraphy-like quickness and liveliness; these continued to inform the balance of his career.  The mid to late 1980s feature flat biomorphic shapes evident, for instance, in his ‘window’ series where forms hover and vibrate within a window-like opening.  The paintings from the 1990s to 2004 float and layer planes of colour.

An exhibition of Perehudoff’s work,The Optimism of Colour: William Perehudoff, a retrospective, is currently being shown across Canada and is accompanied by a book with the same title.

William Perehudoff is a Member of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Saskatchewan Order of Merit.