Lenin by Andy Warhol ( silkscreen – from Artchive)

Another destination visit with our European visitors was to the Vancouver Art Gallery and its main summer exhibition Andy Warhol: Prints and Drawings from the Warhol Museum.

Warhol’s work continues to be shown around the world almost to the point of over-exposure. This VAG show even merited a report on Art Daily (no longer publishing, but archives are still on line), and of course, at The Andy Warhol Museum site. We have all seen lots of Warhol’s work in the past, including here in the VAG and in Europe, so we were pleased to see a number of pieces here that were new to us: some very early works, many drawings and a few prints like the above portrait of Lenin, which I rather liked more than many of his works that have become too common.

Another exhibition Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art presents the hottest contemporary artists working on the West Coast of North America today. Although Vancouver and Los Angeles are internationally recognized art centres, the West Coast has never before been the subject of a major survey exhibition.

Most memorable works for me were the installations by Liz Magor (including “Double Cabinet” shown here), Brian Jungen’s First Nations masks and a wall piece made from red, white and black Nikes, and Russell Crotty’s wonderful hanging Globe Drawings.

Speaking of Brian Jungen, the Vancouver Art Gallery received a $50,000 (U.S.) grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for the purposes of organizing a major touring exhibition of works by this Vancouver artist. Read more via this PDF. I wonder if this is why the VAG presented another Warhol exhibition in less than 10 years. Vancouver gets so few major international exhibitions that I felt disappointed in this decision, the result of budget constraints as usual.