Exhibition: Roy Arden: rag & bone

Roy Arden: rag & bone

October 20th- November 24th, 2012
Opening reception: Saturday, October 20, 4 – 7pm
Artist in attendance

Monte Clark Gallery Toronto is pleased to present rag & bone, an exhibition of recent work in various media by Roy Arden.

Over the last decade, Arden has widened his artistic practice to include collages, videos, paintings, sculpture and web-based projects. Though his practice is becoming more diverse, certain themes continue to run though his work: history, modernity and the archive. Arden has created his own immense archive of images collected from newspapers, magazines and the internet. Driven by a personal necessity, Arden delves into the trash heap of history for images that reveal something about how and why we have arrived at our present predicament.

Arden’s paper collages are intimate in scale and channel the history of collage while entertaining various subjects through their kaleidoscope of cut and torn fragments. Arden’s more recent paintings and drawings usually present singular images in a graphic style similar to early Pop Art, but always with critical intent. His recent sculptures, constructed from discarded, often rusty objects, appear as though they are the idiosyncratic creations of a bricoleur or 'rag & bone' man with spare time and imagination.

Arden's work can be found in numerous public collections in North America and Europe including The National Gallery of Canada, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. He has exhibited in dozens of international exhibitions from New York to Sharjah, and Berlin to Sydney. In 2007 the Vancouver Art Gallery mounted a survey show of his work covering the period 1981-2007.