Gord Peteran: Furniture Meets its Maker

The University of Toronto Art Centre will be the only Canadian venue to mount this important retrospective of contemporary Canadian artist Gord Peteran. Organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Chipstone Foundation with generous support from the Windgate Charitable Foundation, the exhibition of twenty-two works has been shown at the Cranbrook Art Museum and Winterthur Art show Museum among others, and will come to Toronto, its final venue, from the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.

Peteran has launched a boundary-crossing career opening up the category of furniture to an unprecedented range of psychological and conceptual content. He uses: fine cabinetry, found objects, assemblage and sculptural techniques to create a series of works that do not function as furniture, that are quite distinct from craft and which are not quite classifiable as design. Equally, if attempting to view them as sculpture they do not perpetuate the figurative and commemorative connotations of the Western tradition of three-dimensional art, nor can they be plotted on the graph of Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” They constitute a completely sui-generis form of Conceptual art.

Furniture Meets its Maker will be complemented by the smaller scale exhibition Gord Peteran Recent Works, curated by Matthew Brower, UTAC Curator and Lecturer in Museum Studies.