RON MOPPETT

BIO

Ron Moppett is a painter living and working in Calgary, Alberta. Born in England in 1945, he emigrated to Canada in 1957. Moppett attended the Alberta College of Art + Design in Calgary from 1963 to 1967, and the Instituto de Allende in Mexico in 1968. Moppett is one of Canada’s leading contemporary artists who is often at the forefront of advanced research in the field of visual arts. His career includes a significant number of honours, exhibitions, publications and awards, including numerous Canada Council grants and the prestigious Gershon Iskowitz Prize in 1997. In addition to his painting practice, he has worked as a curator and a teacher. He has exhibited extensively throughout Canada, the United States and Europe and two major surveys of his work have been organized by the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre in 1982 and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary in 1990. Moppett’s work can be found in many prominent private and public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain, the Art Gallery of Alberta, Glenbow Museum, and the Mackenzie Art Gallery to name a few. Ron Moppett is represented by TrépanierBaer Gallery in Calgary.

STATEMENT

“My images are both created and appropriated. They range from pop advertising to the art historical and everything in between. The work comes together as collage: associated representations—speculations on everyday life and circumstances, a jamming of spaces and edges. Like concrete poetry, my paintings are more about the symbolic make-up of an idea or theme. They are anthologies of different registers of style, colour and forms of expression operating in the slipstream between the abstract and the representational. My work is about being an author, an image builder and at the same time, a viewer, reader and enthusiast of art and its many histories. Whatif/Twilight is one of several paintings that I’ve done over the years that I call ‘walk in’ pictures. The trigger for this piece was a wonderfully romantic picture of a desert island in Borneo from one of the early CBS Survivor series. Begun in 2000 and completed eight years later, it calls attention to many other works from that time. The sculpture Sculptortimberland started by playing with frog garden stools and noticing that they could reference Haida argillite carvings. The piece is, among other things, about being an artist in the West.”