April 2007
Vancouver-based painter Angela Grossman has had an international reputation since the late 1980s, yet still remains somewhat obscure in her adopted home of Canada.
In fact, Grossmann is so much better known and appreciated in Europe that in a survey published by The Art Newspaper last year, British art students from eleven of the UK’s leading art schools included her on the list of 100 artists that had most inspired and influenced their work.
Grossmann’s studio sits above Cordova Street in Vancouver’s Gastown and is small but bright with south-facing windows that reach the ceiling. Although it is not as messy as she warned me it would be – “I tidied up!” – there are discreet piles everywhere: obsessive creative tangents collected for work. She clears an extra chair, and we talk about German aesthetics, about how much she loves Paris above all cities, and about the supremacy of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films. A serendipitous anecdote: while she was living in Paris, Tarkovsky’s still photographer lived across the hall. Sometimes the world is perfect.
Born in London in 1955, Grossmann grew up surrounded by art. “My parents were both artists: my father the graphic kind, my mother the expressive kind. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a painter and my grandmother on the other was an art collector before she died in the camps. My parents were bohemian leftist intellectual politicos. My mother was in charge of painting all the posters and banners for the anti-war movement (lots of skulls and bombs) which seemed like its headquarters were in our house in London. My mother had covered every inch of wall in our house in heavily painted murals (more skulls and bombs) so we were notorious in the neighbourhood and the other children were forbidden by their parents to enter our home.” Eventually the family moved to Canada where Angela initially chose a different path for herself, “Of course I had no desire to follow in their footsteps, so I rebelled and went to journalism school.” After receiving her BA in Journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, Grossmann took what proved to be a fateful trip to Vancouver in 1981. “My sister had just had a baby, and I was at a very loose end. The drive went from a very frigid grey Toronto to a very verdant green blossoming Vancouver in February – needless to say, I never went back.” Her sister hated the city and moved to France but Grossmann stayed and was accepted to the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (then named Emily Carr College of Art and Design) based on the strength of some drawings she had showed them. “My sister left for France and marooned me here, happily strange in a strange land with no living relative for four thousand miles.” This sense of being ‘marooned’, remote from the family except through history, is a theme that crops up often in Grossmann’s work.
Grossmann first came into wide public recognition in the summer 1985 as one of the eight (lamentably named) “Young Romantics” exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG). Curated by Scott Watson, the show is now notorious for helping launch the careers of some of Canada’s brightest art stars. Grossmann and three others included in the show – Graham Gillmore, Attila Richard Lukacs, and Derek Root – were all classmates attending the Emily Carr Institute who were working and exhibiting together under the moniker Futura Bold. (Also involved was the wayward “fifth Beatle” of the group, as he calls himself, novelist Douglas Coupland, who at that time was studying sculpture.) Although Grossmann was around five years older than her peers in Futura Bold, she says that it made little difference - “girls are always more mature than boys anyways.” This loose collective was joined together by an approach more than a specific style: a kind of return-to-painting philosophy that saw the creation of large-scale pieces filled with gestural brush strokes and personal expression. To many, this passionate practice can be seen as a reaction to the cold conceptualism that had seized visual art in the 80’s – particularly the photoconceptual work of artists like Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, and Rodney Graham that became known as the “Vancouver School.” Aesthetic differences aside, Grossmann is glad the Vancouver School exists: “They’ve brought a lot of sophisticated attention to Vancouver which remains remote and a bit provincial.”
In Futura Bold, Grossmann was most kindred with Lukacs, who is best known for his homoerotic paintings of neo-Nazi skinheads and military men. They were very competitive but also collaborative, “Attila would get me to help him sketch things out, because he couldn’t draw the way I could.” Indeed, Grossmann was often singled out as uniquely gifted in this group, yet her international reputation has not translated into the same curatorial acceptance in Canada that the others enjoy. I asked Grossmann what might have hampered her success in Canada. Without a moment’s pause she replied, “Being a woman.” And she is right. While the familiarity of these other artists has reached the stratosphere, incredibly few female artists from Vancouver have broken into popular recognition. This is the history of art but it still leads Grossmann’s Vancouver dealer and long-time champion, Diane Farris, to seem a bit disdainful about how underrepresented Grossmann is at the VAG. Not a surprising reaction considering that, while the other members of Futura Bold are all included in the VAG’s permanent collection, the city’s official gallery has, to date, never purchased a Grossmann piece.
