The award-winning Canadian artist whose sculptures enliven several sites in Centretown — most recently outside a new condominium at the corner of O’Connor and McLeod streets — is being honoured with an exhibit featuring new paintings, pieces from his own collection and a retrospective of his distinguished career.
Bruce Garner is best known in Ottawa for his dramatic Sparks Street representation of a grizzly bear chowing down on a salmon, and for the nearby ‘Joy,’ a bronze sculpture of four slender silhouettes dancing and looking to the sky.
His latest piece of public art can be seen at the new condo across O’Connor from the mammoths at the Canadian Museum of Nature. ‘Paso Doble,’ commissioned in 2008 for Ashcroft Homes’ new Opus residential development, features two bronze figures reaching skyward in front of several abstract folds that bend in triangular shapes.
The 75-year-old Garner was featured recently in a front-page Ottawa Citizen article that detailed his difficult recovery following a terrible fall in February 2009 that left him in wheelchair and with almost no speech.
But he has continued to produced paintings and drawings, some of which will be on display at the new Cube Gallery retrospective of his career, opening this month at the gallery’s soon-to-open Wellington Street venue in the city’s west end.
Cube Gallery curator Don Monet said it’s a tribute to Garner’s creative power that he continues to produce great artwork despite his profound health challenges.
“He loves it, that’s his life, and as far as he’s concerned he’s going to paint until he can’t anymore,” says Monet.
The artist has been painting pictures of the nurses in the long-term care facility where he currently resides, alongside his characteristic jovial sketches of people flying through the air and dancing, says Monet.
Among Garner’s signature works are the goose and winged figures perched atop a Byward Market broadcasting centre, unveiled in 2000.
His work is filled with images of grand movements like those of a dancer.
The artist’s patrons include Nelson Mandela and Cirque du Soleil, and he has created commissioned pieces for countless businesses and organizations.
“He’s just been a dynamo in the arts scene,” says Monet, noting particularly Garner’s contribution to public art in Ottawa, Canada and the world.
Garner’s first welded sculpture, ‘The Searcher,’ will be for sale at the gallery. Other pieces featured at the show include a marble piece completed in the former Yugoslavia where the artist created a piece for the Belgrade Museum of Modern Art.
The Opus Condominium sculpture was one of Garner’s last two completed public artworks.
“(He) has always been interested in the movement and wonderful negative space that dancers create,” Tamaya Garner, Garner’s partner, said in an email.
“It was like the icing on the cake for this building,” says David Choo, president of Ashcroft Homes.
Choo says the sculpture was a gift from his company to the city.
“I’m very glad that he was able to finish this,” says Choo. “I think we should all enjoy it.”