Gregory Burke Heads Canada’s New Art Gallery

Canada has a major new modern art museum. The striking 126,000 sq ft glass-and-steel Remai Modern has just opened in the remote prairie town of Saskatoon, located in the country’s vast agricultural midwest, and New Zealander Gregory Burke is its “high-profile” international director.

The new museum’s opening exhibition – Field Guide – is an eclectic but engaging mix of collection pieces and new commissions or acquisitions by 80 Canadian and international artists that cleverly fill every stairwell, corridor and landing as well as the more conventional museum galleries.

Burke, formerly of Toronto’s Power Plant, told Global News:

“On opening weekend, the building is the star in a way. The chance to see the beautiful atrium, the mesmerising spaces and everything else, but I think people are also captured by the exhibition we’ve presented and they’ll come back.”

“You can’t take it all in on one go,” he added.

The third floor features the world’s largest collection of Picasso linocut prints, worth $20 million.

Burke estimated the museum holds $60 million worth of art.

According to Wikipedia, Burke has published over 100 texts and curated over 90 exhibitions since the late 1980s, including solo exhibitions for artists Michael Snow, Rosemarie Trockel, Thomas Hirschhorn, Lawrence Weiner, Ian Wallace, Christopher Williams, Goldin+Senneby, Pae White, Sam Durant, Simon Starling, Candice Breitz, Scott Lyall, Derek Sullivan and Len Lye.

He was the director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth from 1998 to 2005, before moving to Canada.

Original article by Giovanna Dunmall, Wallpaper, October 30, 2017.