PASCAL GRANDMAISON
background 1: 1912 - 2007

C-print mounted on Plexiglas, 2008
Image framed: 142.2 x 224.8 cm
A/P
Image courtesy the artist and Galerie René Blouin, Montreal

Estimate: $13,500

Montreal artist Pascal Grandmaison (b. 1975) was recently described in the National Post as “the stuff of art stardom.” He has become known for the contemplative themes of his large-scale photographs and works in film and video. Capturing a psychological complexity through a minimal and detached view, his diverse subjects range from pensive portrait images to deep meditations on the legacies of modernist architecture.

The dates in Background I: 1912-2007 frame the lifespan of Italian film auteur Michelangelo Antonioni. The work is inspired by a scene in Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-up, where characters played by actresses Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills strip and wrestle with the film’s protagonist, the voyeuristic fashion photographer played by David Hemmings, on top of studio backdrop paper. The paper in Grandmaison’s image is packaging for a studio flash-kit, which he photographed unaltered after finding it in a mail-order box. Typical of his formally beautiful, meticulously constructed, optically uncanny works, this photograph combines his interests in popular culture with a fascination in the structure and tools of the photographic medium in ways that play with our sense of time, scale and opticality. Here his effortless melding of form and subject creates a suture between memory and chance.

Born in 1975, Pascal Grandmaison has exhibited extensively in Canada and Europe. In 2006, he had a solo exhibition at the Musee d’art contemporain in Montreal that is touring to the National Gallery of Canada. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, as well as the Prague Biennial. He is represented by Galerie Rene Blouin, Montreal and Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.