Elmer Goes for Popcorn, 1999. Courtesy of the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta.
This exhibition will be the most comprehensive examination of the work of influential Alberta artist Chris Cran, surveying his artistic production over the last 40 years. One of the country’s most notable painters of the last few decades, Cran is known for his experimentations with traditional genres of painting: still-life, portraiture, landscape and abstraction, to which he adds his own particular twist. To this day he continues to use this traditional medium to explore, question and critique other forms of representation including photography and printed media. Working in response to and within the terrain of well known artistic movements such as Pop Art, Photo-realism, Op Art and Modernist abstraction, Cran challenges our understanding and experience of each by playfully combining art history with imagery borrowed from popular culture: cartoons, advertising, magazines illustrations and newspapers. In his recent work, Cran utilizes all of the tropes and techniques he has developed over his career, and often combines them in unorthodox ways. By doing so he continues to explore the medium of painting and defy our expectations.
