Remai Modern Opens in Saskatoon

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The Remai Modern in Saskatoon. (photo by Adrien Williams)

The Remai Modern in Saskatoon. (photo by Adrien Williams)

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A view of the South Saskatchewan River from the Remai Modern

A view of the South Saskatchewan River from the Remai Modern

photo by Adrien Williams.

On the drive from Regina to Saskatoon, I saw the most stereotypical of Prairie sights: streaked with orange rays from the late afternoon sun, a grain elevator with a long string of brown box cars coiled around its base. Set the elevator’s tower on its side and stack the brown box cars neatly on top and this Prairie idyll converts into my destination: the glass, rust-coloured steel and concrete colossus that is Saskatoon’s Remai Modern.

This surprising link to the region’s rural economy is not lost on the building’s lead architect, Bruce Kuwabara, of KPMB Architects, who musingly framed grain elevators as proto-Modernist buildings in remarks to the media prior to the gallery’s official opening on Saturday. The preview’s atmosphere was restrained, with CEO Gregory Burke and chief curator Sandra Guimarães speaking to the assembled – many flown in from New York to write about Canada’s newest public gallery in important international arts publications.

While it didn’t seem like anyone had rained on the parade, perhaps spirits were dampened by the intermittent sprinkles of controversy that have dogged the $84-million venue, which has been touted as an international arts destination to replace Saskatoon’s more modest Mendel Art Gallery. There have been construction delays and cost over-runs, not uncommon for major projects, but also community concerns about the abandonment of the Mendel name, the cost of ongoing operations, the inclusion of Saskatchewan artists and skepticism over whether international visitors will actually trek to a remote city few have heard of before.

Key to positioning the Remai as international rather than regional is the $20-million purchase of some 400 Picasso linocut prints by Ellen Remai, the lead donor and museum namesake whose construction-industry fortune has largely made this ambitious project possible. No artist embodies Modernism in the popular imagination more than Picasso. And Saskatchewan, if the myth-makers are to be believed, almost eclipsed New York when American critic Clement Greenberg, whose name is nearly synonymous with Modernism, led the fabled Emma Lake artist workshop in 1962.

Time may have marched on, but the Remai has included works that recognize both Modernism and the Mendel’s legacy in its inaugural exhibition, Field Guide. Visitors can see beloved works such as Hungarian painter Georges Csató’s Portrait of Mrs. Claire K. Mendel and Lawren Stewart Harris’ Untitled (Mountains Near Jasper). Another link to the Mendel is forged by Eli Bornstein, who exhibited in the Mendel’s first exhibition in 1964 and, now in his 90s, created a new piece for the Remai opening.

The Remai’s branding features a doubling of letters – rRemai mModern – a canny play on big “M” Modernism and small “m” modernism. Modernism with a capital, my art history books say, was a gradually decaying value from the mid-Sixties onward, while small “m” modern art isn’t bracketed by dates. Burke is dismissive of the more common term, contemporary, for the institution’s name. “Contemporary is evacuated of meaning,” he says. “Modern is coming back into being considered again.”

The modern is visible on entering the building’s expansive atrium: South Korean artist Haegue Yang’s Sol LeWitt Upside Down: Four Times Sol LeWitt Upside Down, Version Point to Point immediately establishes a theme of re-reading and re-interpreting the past. Functioning as a sort of grand chandelier, the work lights the space with slender white neon tubes and fills the air with precise ziggurats made from white Venetian blinds.

In an astute move, the Remai prevailed on renowned British conceptual artist Ryan Gander to work with its Picasso linocuts, the most comprehensive collection in the world. Gander views Picasso’s self-images as some of the Spaniard’s finest creative work. He cites iconic photographs of Picasso wearing a striped Breton shirt and cuddling a cat or posed with tiny baguettes as fingers as his jumping off point. Thus, viewers are presented with Faces of Picasso: The Collection Selected by Ryan Gander. The tilted eyes and crescent mouths we expect of Picasso ring the walls of the third-floor gallery. Up to six different versions of a print are hung together, the date the print was pulled informing its placement on the wall, creating a visceral archive of how Picasso’s ideas played out on the linocut plate. “He changed the linocuts as he went along,” says Gander. “That makes a visible practice. You see how he’s making decisions.”

Audacious, prolific and not to be confined to one medium, Gander and Picasso share a certain kinship. In an effort to understand his predecessor, Gander set out to replicate every linocut in the museum’s collection using felt markers and correction fluid. “I started it and enjoyed it for about three hours,” says Gander, whose practice normally does not encompass drawing. “It was a really boring project. I didn’t understand much more about Picasso in the end.” What emerged was a formidable stack of drawings, both published in the Remai’s first book, Picasso and I, and incorporated into Gander’s astonishing installation, Fieldwork.

This piece alone is worth the $12 price of admission. Largely walled off from view, Fieldwork takes up much of the central space in the gallery it shares with the Picasso prints and, like the larger exhibition filling the Remai, takes a stab at including everything. Configured for viewing by one person at a time, with an armchair and side table positioned in front of a window cut into the gallery wall, Fieldwork offers a passing glimpse of various objects created by Gander. Along with the stack of his remakes of the Picasso prints, there's an elegant curve of chocolate nestled in crinkled purple foil, a model of a house sprouting a modernist glass cube from its roof, a pair of white sneakers painted with a ruff of brown mud – all rolling past the window on a conveyor belt.

Gander’s installation introduces levity into the show’s otherwise serious approach. Another space, for instance, includes weighty works by Walid Raad (Lebanon), Rosemarie Trockel (Germany), Ahlam Shibli (Palestine) and Edward Poitras (Canada) that largely engage with the politics and difficulties of defining an identity. Another space holds a literal and metaphorical raft constructed by the artist duo of Tanya Lukin Linklater and Duane Linklater that ensures Indigenous stories are not swamped by the institution’s swell.

Identity is a fitting refrain for this sweeping inaugural exhibition, as the Remai seeks, on various levels, to be all things to all people.

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REMAI MODERN

102 Spadina Crescent E, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7K 0L3

306-975-7610

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