Charlottetown – Local artist Hans Wendt is opening a new exhibition at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery this fall. The show, which presents Wendt’s most recent series of paintings, opens September 6 in the Entrance Gallery.
“Hans Wendt is a committed and exceptionally talented artist,” says Jon Tupper, director at the Gallery. “His multifaceted artistic production is both a means of philosophical expression and livelihood.”
The current exhibition is dedicated to a series of mimetic watercolour paintings that continue Wendt’s longstanding interest in the play between expression and reflection. Wendt states that he likes “very basic and expressive ways of forming or deforming things, such as molding clay by hand, or working out ideas through drawing.” At the same time, he explores the ways expression is filtered or deformed by things beyond his control: mechanical processes of reproduction (Wendt paints from photographs rather than objects, for example), nature’s cycles of growth, decay, mutation, the abstract schema of science or geometry, or just “what happens when you isolate something and put a frame around it.”
Wendt studied art with a nomadic interest. The son of artists, art became a curiosity at an early age. As a young adult he took private drawing, painting and ceramics courses at Holland College School of Visual Arts with Ron Arvidson, Gordon Bellamy and Barry Jeeves, among others, from 1986-1991. After one year at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, Wendt spent time working as a finish carpenter in Los Angeles and Toronto, and was back home summers employed as a potter’s assistant, glazing, hand carving and operating kilns.
Wendt’s past work includes multimedia event production, stage craft, ceramics, pastel drawings, and paintings in several media. His paintings have been featured in numerous exhibitions and are in private collections in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Washington, California, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island.
The Hans Wendt exhibit will be on display at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery September 6 through November 9. It is curated by Lee Plested, a San Francisco-based independent curator.
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Media contact: Dan Wall, publicist, Confederation Centre of the Arts, phone (902) 628-6135
Email: confederationcentre.com, web www.confederationcentre.com