Canal Square, 1992

Gift of the Artist Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery

"Contemporary Manitoba Art from the Collection", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 4 February-15 March 1994 "Into Our Collection: Staff Picks", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 26 June-4 October 2008

Michael Hartley, "Senior I Art Interim Guide 1993", Manitoba Education and Training, 1993, reproduced page 133 "Tableau", Winnipeg Art Gallery, January/February 1995, Vol. 8-1, reproduced pages 3, 8 "Senior 3 English Language Arts (30S): Literary Focus: A Course for Distance Learning, Field Validation Version", Manitoba Education and Training and Youth, n.d., unpaginated, reproduced Denis Cooley, Amy Karlinsky and Mary Reid, "Figure Ground: The Paintings and Drawings of Ivan Eyre", Winnipeg, 2005, page 19 "MyWAG", Winnipeg Art Gallery, Spring/Summer 2018, reproduced page 12

This artwork is currently on display at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Please contact our specialists for more information. Landscape painting is paramount in Ivan Eyre's art, with the scenery of Saskatchewan and Manitoba figuring prominently as works of imagination, an ode to the artist’s personal history. Commenting on the landscape genre of painting, the artist stated: “The subject is inexhaustible. Infinite possibilities exist. It’s still possible to make of a landscape a very personal statement even a radical one, different from anything previous.” Sometimes identified as a Surrealist, Eyre would simply state that his work is characterized by his own personal mythology. "Canal Square" is a prime example of one of Eyre’s later large-scale cityscapes with a surrealist and dream-like quality. As the title suggests, it depicts a city square with tall buildings and highly stylized and distorted figures. This realm of unidentifiable figuration, yet separate from abstraction, is a unique and intriguing characteristic of Eyre’s work.