ROBERT YOUDS BIOGRAPHY

Robert Youds (BFA, University of Victoria, 1978; MFA, York University, Toronto, 1982) has exhibited his artwork professionally since the late 1970s. While Youds began his career as a painter, by the early 1980s he became interested in issues of colour and space beyond the limitations of the picture plane. This interest led Youds to examine the conditions of the spectatorial and its relationship to constructed objects and images situated in real space. At that time, perhaps with the exception of a handful of major artists such as Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Blinky Palermo, Anne Truitt, Dan Flavin, and Gerhard Richter, there were not many artists significantly contributing toward this new jurisdictional aesthetic in art that exists between the areas of sculpture and painting. (Youds draws a distinction between his preoccupations and the generalized area of installation practice that also blossomed in the late 1970s.) While he was acutely aware of the contributions by these artists and their works, he developed a growing interest in architecture and design as holding possibilities for larger social and interactive implications for art—to infuse significant new fuel into his perceptual and aesthetic query. While the aforementioned minimalists’ work had really only opened the door of possibilities for Youds, there was, in his mind, much more to do. His current practice combines the areas of architecture, design, painting, and sculpture at the foundational core of his artistic work. Within the disciplinary specifics, and their limitations, he believes colour and space hold greater communicative roles to play. In this manner, Youds follows a path of exploration involving the combination of pictures, objects, and things, as well as their cultural relationship to issues of colour and light in space. This claim places his career more accurately within the realm and specificity of objecthood, including its intersection and its absorption into the changing roles of art within a broader cultural, phenomenological, and everyday-viewer experience of the world.

In 2015, Youds was commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery to produce a major outdoor project as part of their ongoing Offsite series. The work was entitled For Everyone a Sunset. It involved the use of materials such as twenty tons of salvaged glass, aluminium, and neon, and it was designed to capture and mirror the city’s own evolving image, including buildings being built and coming down around the site. With special project assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Youds created For Everyone a Fountain at Open Space—a similarly sized architecture-like piece. It engages the spectator in a dynamic tension of seeing and experiencing—where the physical object intersects with the illusory realm. The work features a computer-activated lighting program that translates a set of photographic landscape images into changing light and colour. There is also a sound component to the work that unravels against the simultaneous light display occurring in real time. In these mutual works, Youds’ aim is to create a situation where an incomplete partition of the everyday happens between the viewing experience of the built structure and the work’s own reciprocity of human presence and poetic communication.

Work by Robert Youds has been presented by influential galleries and museums such as Power Plant, Toronto, Ontario, (1995); SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (1999); Museum of the City of Mexico, Mexico City (1999); Oliver Art Center, CCA, Oakland, California (1999); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario (2003); Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta, (2006); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, (2010); Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (2013); Xi’an Art Museum, Xi’an, China (2014); Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia (2015); and Today Art Museum, Beijing, China (2015), among many others.

Robert Youds’ art has been represented by Sable-Castelli Gallery, Toronto; Post Wilshire, Los Angeles; Diaz Contemporary, Toronto; William Turner, Los Angeles; and, most recently, Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto.

His work has been included in EXPO CHICAGO, Art Los Angeles Contemporary, and Art Toronto.

Youds’ work was the subject of a major survey, beautiful beautiful artificial field, 2007, at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. The catalogue included essays by writers Saul Ostrow and Barry Schwabsky, artist Karin Davie, and curator Lisa Baldissera.

SELECTED COMMISSIONS: Royal Bank Building, Toronto (2010); TorontoDominion Centre, Toronto (architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, 2014), Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite (2014–15).

Robert Youds’ work is held in twenty-two public collections and has been published in twenty-seven exhibition catalogues to date.

For detailed CV, visit www.robertyouds.ca/exhibitions/collections/ catalogues/.