Fran Hill Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto
Literature
Sandra Martin, Gerald Gladstone, artist 1929-2005, Globe and Mail, Toronto, Wednesday, March 9, 2005
Gerald Gladstone, Gerald Gladstone: artist, Toronto, 1983, pages 1 and 4
Paul Russell, Sculptures can be glamorous tv lamps, October 31, 1970, not paginated
After a long career working as an artist and executive in the advertising profession at MacLaren Advertising, Gerald Gladstone decided to pursue a career as a fine artist, stating “I wanted to advertise the spirit, which can’t be done except in fine art.”
A large part of Gladstone’s oeuvre focused on welded steel sculptures, and as Gary Michael Dault observed, “people were still bashing at stone…Gladstone’s sculptures, with their welded rods and whirling discs, looked adventurously modernist in the all-too-provincial Toronto of the 1950s.” Gladstone built a foundry to execute these modernist works inspired by the Russian constructivism movement of the 1920s. Each creation at the foundry would be cast, baked, cured, annealed, and then lathed and polished. Gladstone was commissioned to create artwork for the public sphere, many of which can still be viewed in public spaces across Canada.
Gladstone was a member of the important group of artists who exhibited with Av Isaacs at his art gallery in the 1950s, where he exhibited paintings, sculptures and lucite forms. Gladstone wished to project a new reality through his work, remarking that “the welded steel sculptures and those imbedded in the lucite shapes represent symbolic galaxies and the energies represented in them.”
For Gladstone, these concentric compositions in lucite are microscopic images of the cosmos, representing the galaxy and the inner and outer spaces of the earth. Gladstone was commissioned by the Art Committee of the Ontario Government in 1967-68 to create a dynamic work of art for the entrance lobby of the Macdonald Block. Gladstone erected Galaxy Series #2, a sculpture composed of forty welded steel structures of varying sizes, each imbedded in lucite cubes, rectangles and triangles, in blue, clear and magenta colours. Following this creation was “Venus & Saturn Series”, reflecting the idea that each lucite cube can stand alone as a sculpture, can be stacked or grouped with other lucite cubes as desired, or act as a functional light fixture within a home or office.
Gladstone’s artistic pursuit was to have art act as a reflection of the world, in that the artwork is not a fixed static product to be contemplated from a distance, but is meant to be walked around, walked into, assembled, reassembled and challenged creatively. As Paul Russell stated, “ask yourself the ultimate Gerald Gladstone question: Is this a work of art posing as a lamp, or a lamp posing as a work of art.”
