A Collector on Collecting

Check out Bob Rennie’s private museum in Vancouver – but only if you book a tour.

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While most art galleries allow you come and go as you wish, wandering the space at your own pace, the Rennie Museum in Vancouver is open only to those who book an hour-long Saturday tour.

A private museum in an unassuming storefront in the Wing Sang Building in Chinatown, it features rotating exhibitions culled from the extensive collection of contemporary art amassed by Bob Rennie, one of Vancouver’s leading collectors. Entry is always free. And there’s no curator – Rennie himself picks the pieces he wants to show.

This spring, Collected Works features four artists – Andrew Grassie, William E. Jones, Louise Lawler and Catherine Opie – who consider collecting in everyday life and how objects can define people.

On the main floor, four paintings by Grassie, a Scottish artist, look at first like photographs because of their small size and life-like detail. Opposite them, photographs by Lawler, an American, depict art in various private and public settings. They cleverly play off Grassie’s work, which depicts an art collector’s apartment and the same works in packing crates in a warehouse. But Lawler's pieces seems intimate and voyeuristic compared to Grassie's rather mundane work.

Upstairs, the most interesting art is by Opie, an American photographer who was given access to Elizabeth Taylor’s home shortly before the star’s death. Opie creates an intimate portrait of Taylor’s life via the objects she collected and displayed in her home. Each photo is a vignette of her day-to-day life, whether it’s a collection of shoes or a crowded make-up table.

Some images reflect Taylor’s glamorous lifestyle, but many show familiar things, like photos of family and friends. The twist is that Taylor’s photos include stars like Michael Jackson. A couple of Opie’s photographs are blurry, but the tour guide explained this is intended to convey how memories of a person fade away.

Also upstairs are 22 photographs by Jones, an American artist and filmmaker. They depict the Athens villa of the late art dealer Alexander Iolas, who collected works by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, René Magritte and Max Ernst.

Iolas had hoped the building, which held some 10,000 ancient and modern works, would become a museum. However, the Greek government never acted on his offer and after his death in 1987, the collection was looted and the villa vandalized. Jones took photos in 1982 and more in 2017, when the villa was in ruins.

Lawler’s huge black-and-white digital drawing, Pollock and Tureen, is also on view upstairs. The top part of the piece, made in 2008, traces drips of paint in a Jackson Pollock painting. The network of flowing lines and shapes is both playful and perplexing. At the bottom, a tureen is drawn using the same technique.

Together, they look like an abstract still life. The work is impressive for the simplicity of its concept, and how effectively it juxtaposes art and object. It exists as a digital file that can be printed at any size and discarded after the exhibition, a reminder that things are more disposable nowadays.

Throughout the tour, our guide, Fiorela Argueta, an art history student at UBC, used the exhibition, which continues until June 15, as a way to explore how we curate our lives through objects, whether it’s high-priced art or a bowl of seashells.

She posed open-ended questions: What do these objects say about us? What portrait do they construct of their owner? What happens to our objects when we die? Argueta struck the right balance of enthusiasm and education. It was much better than reading didactic panels.

I was told Rennie set up the tours because he wants people to have a thoughtful experience, not just the glance-and-go common at other galleries. I respect that. ■

Spring 2019: Collected Works is on view at the Rennie Museum in Vancouver from Feb. 16 to June 15, 2019.

Rennie Collection at Wing Sang

51 East Pender Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6A 1S9

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By appointment only