Art Prof Featured on National Magazine's Website
November 07, 2008 - Campus Bulletin
A University of Guelph studio art professor is featured this week by Canadian Art, the country's leading visual arts magazine.
Prof. Will Gorlitz, who teaches drawing and painting in the School of Fine Art and Music, is spotlighted in the magazine's new web-based program that highlights exhibition activity of Canadian artists.
The segment, which includes both video and audio, features Gorlitz's latest exhibition of paintings on view at the Birch Libralato gallery in Toronto until November 15. The representational works featured include an unlikely assortment of subjects from wild animals estranged in fields of snow to skewed landscape views of the University of Guelph's Arboretum.
"I think this use of the Internet offers an extremely effective service," Gorlitz said. "I appreciate how well the format they are using represents my work. More importantly, it's available for the public to access while the exhibition is still on display rather than after it's well over and too late to visit, as is often the case with the publishing schedule of a magazine."
Gorlitz's exhibition includes a series of landscapes that involve very specific compositional re-orientations of the conventional viewpoint, such as trees being turned by 45 degrees. In other paintings, various animals from disparate global regions appear together, a commentary on human stewardship in the face of climate change.
Gorlitz, a U of G faculty member since 2001, has exhibited his artwork nationally and internationally in public and commercial galleries for more than 30 years. Venues include the Shanghai Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. His work has also been featured in numerous periodicals, books and catalogue publications.
Currently, a nationally circulating survey exhibition of his work "Nowhere if Not Here" is at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Created in partnership with Guelph's Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, the show is a comprehensive cross-section of Gorlitz's paintings that span a period of nearly 20 years.
Born in Buenos Aires and raised in Winnipeg, he studied at the University of Manitoba School of Art and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
