Max Dean Purchase: Performative Portrait & Still life
June 7, 2012
In February of this year, the Museum purchased senior Canadian artist Max Dean’s 2011 chromogenic print, Chair Without Front Legs, thanks to a generous bequest from the Donald Murray Shepherd Trust. It is McMaster’s first work by Dean and a significant addition to our contemporary collection.
Chair Without Front Legs is from a 2011 suite of photographs titled Objects Waiting – a visual archive of personal objects that have significance to Dean’s studio practice and personal history. The artist discusses the series in this Canadian Art interview (where you may see a much smaller version of McMaster’s photograph):
The personal object in this new acquisition is, obviously, the chair, which references Max Dean’s earlier ambitious project Robotic Chair, a robotic self destruct chair that can put itself back together.
With fortuitous timing, Dean’s photo was purchased just as Guest Curator E.C. Woodley was selecting collection works for his exhibition, The Last Things Before the Last. He included it in the exhibition and wrote about it in the guide book:
“Not unlike [Gerhard] Richter’s Isa, Max Dean’s self-portrait involves a face obscured. But here the gesture in one of grief. In the suite Objects Waiting, Dean stages encounters with his artistic and personal biography, central to which is the suicide of his mother. This work could be seen as a self-portrait and as a kind of family photo.”
Max Dean’s Chair Without Front Legs will be on view in the Museum’s Levy Gallery until August 4, 2012.
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