Robert Fones – Signs | Forms | Narratives

Description

This catalogue was produced to accompany the retrospective exhibition of Robert Fones’ “Signs | Forms | Narratives” presented at Museum London, Ontario and at the Art Museum, University of Toronto. It includes high-resolution photographs of artworks, essays, list of works, artist information and acknowledgements.

“Governor General Award-winning artist and writer Robert Fones is widely celebrated for his exquisitely rendered paintings and hybrid photographic sculptures that make us puzzle over the forms that surround us in our everyday, zeroing in on the most engaging paradoxes of visual perception. This major retrospective, the most extensive survey to date of the artist’s production, highlights his most influential artworks ranging from monumental letter forms, to lightboxes, to two-dimensional works that create the illusion of three dimensions.

Having been initiated into art in the late 1960s in London Ontario— a scene that privileged the artistic pursuit of what Greg Curnoe named “the roots of your own experience,” Fones has carved out his own highly particularized approach to witnessing the world around him. Recording his observations through highly compelling pictorial illusionism and finely crafted sculptural forms, he engages themes as wide ranging as agricultural production, geologic time, commercial sign systems, the anthropomorphic, and the sculptural form of the alphabet. His iconoclastic approach to this dynamic range of familiar forms invites the common and familiar to be made strange, all the better to observe how we make meaning of things.” – Press Release:  Art Museum, University of Toronto

Published by

Museum London and Art Museum, University of Toronto

Introduction by

Cassandra Getty

Essays by

Julian Jason Haladyn, Adam Lauder, Sarah Robayo Sheridan, Robert Fones

ISBN

978-1-988672-03-8

Publication Year

2017

Number of Pages

Hardcover, 220