This exhibition, drawn from the collection, highlights artworks that display the physical involvement of the artist in their making. These works demonstrate the visual language of bodily movement, the traces in a finished artwork of touch, gesture, action. Some of these works invoke rhetorics of spontaneity and performance, as in the work of Zhu Lan, which draws from her training in the improvisational tradition of Chinese ink painting; others, that of witnessing, as in Carl Beam’s memorial portraits, which fuse documentary photographs and his own energetic brushwork. In each case, evidence of the living person having been there, active, alive, involved, committed is central to the artistic statement.

Curated by Pan Wendt.

Lise Gervais, Regatta, 1970, oil on linen, 122.2 x 182.8 cm. Gift of Michel Huart, Beaconsfield, Quebec, 1988. CAG 88.7