12.25 × 17 in (31.1 × 43.2 cm) (item)
Acquired directly from the Artist, late 1960s/early 1970s
Private Collection, Ontario
Ben Partis, Robert Fones and Carol Ann M. Ryan, Greg Curnoe, Shaped Collages 1965-1968, London, 2011, page 61
From December 1965 to August 1968, Greg Curnoe produced approximately fifty shaped collages mounted on painted wooden supports. Revolver belongs to an important and distinctive body of work in Curnoe’s practice, one that gave him the freedom to work quickly and intuitively. In creating these cutouts, he also began experimenting with unconventional materials, marking a departure from his earlier methods. Made from found paper clippings, Plexiglass, and scraps of wood from his studio, the collages reflect Curnoe’s fascination with popular culture while helping him develop the distinctive framing devices that would become characteristic of his work. Although the collages draw directly from the artist’s everyday experiences, as Robert Fones observes, Curnoe’s juxtapositions were neither isolated nor arbitrary. His work was also shaped by the Neo-Dada and Pop sensibilities of American and British artists of the 1950s, which had a direct impact on his practice. Like the other shaped collages of this brief but key period—thermometers, moustaches, ties, noses, and blimps—Curnoe’s Revolver demonstrates the humour he shared with his international contemporaries, while revealing his interest in transforming discarded commercial materials into forms that evoke the abstracted human body and the machine. As Robert Fones notes, Revolver has a similar irony in that it only shoots visual information. "I recall seeing Curnoe walking east on Dundas Street carrying the revolver collage and being struck by the irony—since Curnoe was an avowed pacifist—of his carrying a firearm."
