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LESZEK WYCZOLKOWSKI:
BEYOND SYMBOLISM
(lower gallery)

and

September 13 - November 3, 2001

Organized for 2001 Art City - Calgary Festival of Visual Arts, Architecture & Design

The Triangle Gallery of Visual Arts presents two evocative exhibitions,

• Leszek Wyczolkowski: Beyond Symbolism (lower gallery), and
• Chin Shek Lam: Paintings from the Mind's Eye (upper gallery).
  
  Both presentations have been organized for 2001 Art City - Calgary Festival of Visual Arts, Architecture & Design. The official opening of both exhibitions will take place at the Triangle Gallery on Thursday, September 13, 2001 at 7:30 p.m.

Curated by Jacek Malec, an art historian and the Director of the Triangle Gallery, the exhibition, Leszek Wyczolkowski: Beyond Symbolism is a first major presentation in western Canada of this internationally acclaimed Canadian print artist and painter of Polish descent, who currently works and resides in Missassauga, Ont. This presentation analyzes Wyczolkowski's impressive body of work in a context of symbolism and his subsequent interest in some aspects of Oriental philosophy.

Leszek Wyczolkowski -Space Journey, 1993; etching/mixed media on paper

Born in 1950 in Zielonki near Warsaw, Poland, Wyczolkowski was brought up in a specific family environment in which art, literature and music were highly regarded and, which consequently activated his creative mind. Wyczolkowski received his first artistic training at an early age from his father, Witold Wyczolkowski, a gifted artist and illustrator. From 1975 to 1977 Wyczolkowski studied printmaking and graphic design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Faculty of Painting & Graphic Art). In 1977 he has embarked on an artistic voyage to Austria, France, Greece and Italy. In 1978 Wyczolkowski arrived in Toronto, where he continued his artistic education at the Faculty of Printmaking & Graphic Design, the Ontario College of Art. The unconventional and poetic style of his works has won him the admiration of Canadian and international art critics. Since 1982, Wyczolkowski has participated in over 100 solo and group exhibitions in Canada, United States, Poland, Greece, Sweden, Great Britain, and Austria. His works appear in the collections of major museums and public art galleries of these countries.

Looking at his works, we may state that it was nature that provided Wyczolkowski with a primary source of inspiration. Yet it was not the intimate detail of natural forms that fascinated him, but their underlying organic structure, their varied rhythms, the tensions between plane and line and, especially, nature as a depository of symbols. To these qualities he has given new intensity and direct expression. Wyczolkowski's symbolic language appears to express the principles of growth and continuos transformation that one finds in nature. Wyczolkowski's fundamental association with nature has continued and has been regularly renewed throughout his artistic career. His intense identification with nature has resulted in it becoming an inner vision, a region of the soul, where are both, actual landscapes and landscapes of the mind, worlds of sense and metaphor.

Wyczolkowski's art should also be analyzed from the angle of his most recent interest in Oriental philosophy, as some of his works embody the elements of Taoist philosophy. It is in his art that Wyczolkowski searches for the balance between opposite elements, for this is Taoist vision of the world that all opposite things are in balance. In his paintings and etchings Wyczolkowski makes that special effort to work on principles of balance, a Yin and Yang of colour (light and dark, warm and cold), of pattern (open and closed, detailed part and coherent whole), and of shape (circle and square and overall field). A composition thus becomes an orchestration of vital forces expressed in specific symbols and announcing a new path of his art.

Wyczolkowski is not easy to classify or label as his art stands apart from contemporary schools and movements. If classification is required, his art may be considered as belonging to a school of contemporary neo-symbolism or neo-geometry - if such schools exist in the post-modern melting pot. Leszek Wyczolkowski has carved his unique niche in contemporary Canadian art, because his art - so diverse both in substance and in form - mirrors the vital problem of humanity and nature in an inseparable way. Within the confines of these poetic forms of various provenance and symbolic meanings, the force of life and growth pulses with an indomitable strength.VIEW SHOW

Chin Shek Lam (1918-1990) – Mandala, 1972; gouache & ink on rice paper mounted on canvas

Chin Shek Lam's art is rooted in the disciplined mastery of the ancient art of Chinese calligraphy. After a notable career that included the founding in 1944 of the Institute of Oriental Art in China and in 1949 the creation of the Institute of Oriental Art in Hong Kong, and then the Han-Nan College of Fine Art, he left for Europe to study Western approaches to art. There, he met Picasso, Miro, and many other artists and, being a master of Eastern approaches, he began to incorporate Western techniques and approaches to art. Like many other immigrants, he came to Canada in 1970 to find a better life for his family. He first settled in Vancouver before coming to Alberta, and eventually living in Calgary from 1981 to 1987. A prolific artist, he had numerous exhibitions in Europe, the Far East, Australia, the United States, and across Canada.

This exhibition offers an overview of Chin Shek Lam's impressive artistic career. It illustrates his development as a calligrapher while he was living in China and Hong Kong, and how he was affected by the "Urban Nature" of Vancouver that he experienced when immigrated to Canada. This presentation showcases Chin Shek Lam's unique blending of Eastern styles of writing and painting with Western elements of writing and painting. Lam's later works make the strong references to the historic trend at the end of the Sung dynasty AD 960-1279, when the Literati or scholarly class of artists were turning away from a realistic rendering in painting toward a more graphic stylization that stressed the fundamental similarity between painting and calligraphy. The Literati's conception was to produce works that embodies a personal and powerful expression; therefore, different widths of brushstrokes were used to express different emotions. Lam's work in this exhibition shows development towards a more powerful personal expression. Although abstract, his work is suggestive of the balance, contrast and energy of nature. In a personal vision uniquely his own, Lam had had a powerful influence on his students, eager collectors of his work, and on all who knew him personally. His mind's eye always sought to connect elements so that life and art became a harmony with each flowing into the other. Here is a synthesis of East and West. VIEW SHOW