Andrea Mantegna: Battle of the Sea Gods (left side)
c.1485-1488
Engraving on laid paper 28 x 42.7 cm.
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

On our recent visit to Kamloops, our daughter took us to see several art exhibitions. The major ones were in the Kamloops Art Gallery:

– Beautiful Monsters: Beasts and Fantastic Creatures in Early European Prints and Picasso’s Beasts, both on loan from the National Gallery of Canada

– unlimited edition, prints by Indigenous artists in the Kamloops Art Gallery’s permanent collection

– Andrea Kastner’s The Waste Land

All were fascinating and beautiful exhibits. The large selection of Early European engravings, etching and woodcuts by many well-known artists was an impressive collection requiring close study of their dense and highly detailed work. The Picasso etchings were a selection from his Vollard Suite, some familiar and some new to me and all marvellous work, of course. The KAG’s collection of prints by well-known Indigenous artists was wonderful to see all together. Such a variety of periods and styles of printmaking in these three exhibitions – food for a printmaker’s soul, also much enjoyed by our daughter and my husband.

Kastner’s large contemporary paintings are very beautiful, yet horrible in their look at our industrial and household “waste lands”.

Please read more about these exhibits at the Kamloops Art Gallery website. They provided a lovely booklet to take home, from where I captured the above image. No photos were allowed.

Other exhibits we visited were at The Old Courthouse Cultural Centre which houses the Kamloops Courthouse Gallery, The Kamloops Arts Council, a gift shop, and the Arnica Artist Run Center gallery. The latter space had another print exhibition organized by the Kamloops Printmakers, an International Print Exchange (more details here).

One more interesting print exhibition that we saw was at the Thompson Rivers University – work by the first and second year printmaking students and some guests. We were pleased to meet the artist-instructor and share stories about techniques, educational experiences and more. What a weekend of art shows, thanks to our daughter for organizing this tour!

I’ll write a bit about the university in another post as this is too long already.