The Vancouver Artwork Gallery (VAG) introduced on Friday (17 January) that it has obtained a promised present of 122 works from the native collectors Brigitte and Henning Freybe valued at over C$10m ($7m).
Probably the most vital donation of worldwide modern artwork within the gallery’s historical past was welcome information for the beleaguered VAG, which introduced final month it was scrapping plans for a brand new C$600m ($444.6m) Herzog & de Meuron-designed constructing that had been in improvement for greater than a decade.
The Freybes have been amassing artwork for over six a long time and their various assortment spans portray, printmaking, sculpture, movie, pictures and set up. Their present to the VAG contains works by what VAG director Anthony Kiendl calls “a number of the most necessary European and North American artists working within the final 50 years”—many hardly ever proven in Vancouver—together with Nairy Baghramian, Christian Boltanski, Daniel Buren, Tacita Dean, Frank Stella, Alicja Kwade, Wolfgang Tillmans, Robert Rauschenberg, Julie Mehretu and William Kentridge. The Freybes’ assortment additionally celebrates Vancouver artists, and their present contains work by Beau Dick, Stan Douglas, Geoffrey Farmer, Rodney Graham, Brian Jungen and Jeff Wall.
Henning and Brigitte Freybe, 2024 Photograph: Christos Dikeakos
“We’re honoured to just accept this transformative present from the Freybes,” Kiendl mentioned at a celebratory reception Thursday night time. “The Freybe assortment is various and wide-ranging—materially, geographically and conceptually—and at its core, it honours the creativity and data that artists produce. This acquisition will reshape the gallery’s holdings of native and worldwide artwork and add vital works by main figures from the modern artwork world.”
Highlights from the present will likely be featured in an upcoming exhibition, Postcards from the Coronary heart (18 April-5 October) and bringing collectively work, sculptures, images, movies and works on paper from the Sixties to in the present day.
The Freybes have championed modern artwork in Vancouver for many years. Brigitte Freybe co-founded the Modern Artwork Society of Vancouver in 1972 and, in 2015, she and her husband Henning, the retired chairman and founding father of Freybe Gourmand Meals, based Griffin Artwork Initiatives to provide again to the group. Their private relationships with artists whose works they collected will likely be revealed by archival photographs and ephemera additionally included in Postcards from the Coronary heart.
Rodney Graham, Pipe Cleaner Artist, Amalfi, ‘61, 2013 Assortment of the Vancouver Artwork Gallery, Promised Present of Brigitte and Henning Freybe. Photograph: Courtesy of 303 Gallery
“That is a very particular second for us to not solely see our assortment collectively, however to share these vital and visionary creative voices with Vancouver audiences and past,” the Freybes mentioned in a joint assertion. “We’re deeply invested within the Vancouver Artwork Gallery and its providing to town. Gifting our assortment to the gallery and investing in its future is our manner of giving again to this necessary group.”
Henning Freybe informed The Artwork Newspaper that the present had been deliberate for a while however that he and his spouse had been ready for the precise second to make it official. Citing their lengthy relationship with the VAG—Henning was a board member within the Seventies and his spouse within the 80s—he mentioned he felt that their legacy “was in secure fingers on the VAG. We might have donated the works to the Nationwide Gallery in Ottawa, however we knew that the artwork can be seen extra broadly right here in Vancouver and never simply saved in a basement.”
He added that the couple’s relationship with the VAG has “been an exquisite a part of our life identical to the artwork has been an exquisite a part of our life”.
Left: Tara Donovan, Toothpicks, 2004. Proper: Frank Stella, Piaski III, 1973 Donovan: Assortment of the Vancouver Artwork Gallery, Promised Present of Brigitte and Henning Freybe. Photograph: Vancouver Artwork Gallery. Stella: Assortment of the Vancouver Artwork Gallery, Promised Present of Brigitte and Henning Freybe, © 2024 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/CARCC Ottawa, Photograph: Vancouver Artwork Gallery
Highlights of the exhibition embody Tara Donovan’s Toothpicks (2004), a free-standing dice assembled from tons of of 1000’s of picket toothpicks, which celebrates the transformation of supplies—a recurring theme within the Freybe assortment.
A jewel of the gathering is Sea Cow Treaty (Unfold) (1977), a sculptural wall-based work by Robert Rauschenberg. The assemblage encompasses a working water function with twinned faucets that emit pink and blue water into conjoined buckets. It will likely be proven for the primary time in a museum setting, with assist from the Robert Rauschenberg Basis on the event of the artist’s one centesimal birthday.
One other work from the identical period included within the present and the exhibition is Frank Stella’s Piaski III (1973). The canvas, felt and paint on corrugated cardboard work is from the artist’s necessary Polish Village sequence of assemblages. Brigitte Freybe informed The Artwork Newspaper: “It was one of many first works we acquired in 1973. And it was offered to us by Doug Chrismas.” (The vendor, who began his profession in Vancouver, was sentenced to 2 years in federal jail within the US earlier this week.)
