John Greer (sculptor)

John Greer RCA (born 1944) is a Canadian sculptor who likes to bring cultural and natural history together.[1] One critic calls him one of Canada's most philosophically minded artists.[1] He looks to ancient Celtic stones and Greek sculpture for inspiration.[2]

Origins (1995), installed outside the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax

Life and work
...it is Greer's carved marble and cast bronze sculptures that confirm his place as one of the most compellingly thoughtful and accomplished sculptors at work in Canada.[3]

Ron Shuebrook

Born in Amherst, Nova Scotia. Greer studied Fine Art from 1962 to 1967 in Halifax, Montreal and Vancouver. Greer has exhibited his work since 1967 extensively in Canada, USA, Korea and Europe. He taught sculpture at NSCAD University in Halifax for 26 years and is based in South Shore, Nova Scotia, and Pietrasanta, Italy.

His exhibits include:

  • Origins, 1995 is permanently installed in the Ondaatje courtyard of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
  • Gathering, 2001, adjacent to the National Museum in Yongsan Park in Seoul, Korea
  • Reflection, 2001, the Monument to Canadian Aid Workers memorial to Canadian Aid Workers in Ottawa, Canada.
  • Reflecting on Culture in Halifax, NS in 2006.
  • Alluding to Allusion April, 2008 in Brookhaven College, Farmers Branch, Texas.[4]

In 2009, he installed the piece Humble Ending in La Serpara, a sculpture garden North of Rome. The solo exhibitions of APPRÉHENSION - APPREHENSION at Galerie Samuel Lallouz in Montreal, PQ in 2009. In 2011 his work The Sirens was permanently installed in a private park in Switzerland. The large-scale installation Cradle was completed in the spring of 2012 for the same private collection. The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia has a major travelling retrospective of Greer's work, retroActive, which opened in 2015. A reviewer wrote that the real story of this exhibition was that Greer changed from being a sculptor whose work was based on theory to being one who was object-based.[5]

Greer is the recipient of numerous awards and grants; in 2009 he received the prestigious Governor General's Award in Visual Arts in recognition of his lifetime achievement and significant contribution to contemporary Canadian visual art. He prefers sculpture as his language and tries to engage the viewer in being a human, thinking object among objects, a being "of" the world, a cultural object.

Honours

References
  1. Tippett 2017, p. 226.
  2. Tippett 2017, p. 225.
  3. Shuebrook, Ron (September–October 1987). "John Greer-Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, 1987". Vanguard. 16 (4). Retrieved 5 October 2013.
  4. John Greer, Thomas Seawell Exhibit at Brookhaven Archived 2008-05-17 at the Wayback Machine
  5. Hammock, Virgil. "John Greer Goes retroActive". viedesarts.com. Vie des arts, Automne 2015. Retrieved 2020-08-22.
  6. "Members since 1880". Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Archived from the original on 26 May 2011. Retrieved 11 September 2013.
  7. "2009 Winners". Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 31 May 2016.

Bibliography


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