Alex Colville: Return

In 1945, Alex Colville, a young Canadian war artist from Amherst, Nova Scotia, was one of three painters admitted to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as it was being liberated. He would later become one of Canada’s most celebrated artists. In Alex Colville: Return, curator and writer Tom Smart suggests that, metaphorically and artistically, Colville has never stopped going back to the horrors that he witnessed in Germany. Designed to accompany a major exhibition of Colville’s recent paintings, prints, and drawings organized by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Alex Colville: Return places Colville’s recent work in the broader context of the artist’s oeuvre. Beginning with his formation as an artist, Tom Smart suggests that the exacting naturalism and underlying sense of foreboding in Colville’s renderings of everyday life result, in part, from his experience of the Holocaust. Using recent paintings such as Embarkation 񢉊) and Dressing Room 񢉒), Smart traces the evolution of Colville’s contemporary work back to his earlier pieces, including the now famous Horse and Train 񢈢) and Ocean Limited 񢈪). In this insightful and provocative book, featuring over 40 colour reproductions, Smart demonstrates that Colville’s images are more than superbly crafted depictions of a somewhat mythical world. These complexly coded works command the disorder and chaos of trauma into order, coherence, and closure. Today, the world is disrupted once again by the atrocities of war, and Smart’s assessment of the wounds behind Colville’s unique works of art resonates with special potency. In a subliminal way, art lovers have always understood that Colville’s images are not benign, comforting representations of the real world. For the first time, in Alex Colville: Return, Tom Smart gets to the bottom of this understanding, revealing the pentimento of Colville’s astonishing and gripping vision.