Location: Exterior of Canadian Western Bank at 10305 – Jasper Ave.

With the turn of the 20th century, the modern movement in art had begun. Avant-garde artists were no longer concerned about representing the world as it appeared – the camera could do that. Instead, artists were liberated to explore the world as it was felt or thought about. A fertile ground was laid for artists to experiment with proportion, form, technique and material, and from this abstraction was born.

Well-known Edmonton artist and curator Terry Fenton provides a good foundation to understanding Hide’s work. He writes:

“For some thirty years, Edmonton has provided a unique environment for sculpture, especially for sculpture in the Cubist tradition. That tradition was started by Picasso almost a hundred years ago and was enriched by Julio Gonzales, David Smith, and Anthony Caro.

Mostly this tradition has used steel as a working material. Steel lends itself to cutting, arranging, and joining; it takes Cubist collage into the third dimension. The tradition took root in Edmonton some thirty years ago with Alan Reynolds, who was soon followed by Catherine Burgess, Clay Ellis, Ken Macklin, Vesna Makale, and Peter Hide. Hide has done much to encourage and maintain the tradition through teachings in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta.” (2002)

As one looks over the public art placed in the City, we can see the legacy of these  traditions in the next generation of Edmonton artists including: Andrew French, Mark Bellows, Ryan McCourt, Bianca Khan, Rob Wilms, Linda Maines, and Cynthia Sentara.

Biography: A graduate of the U.K.’s Croydon College of Art (1964) and St. Martin’s School of Art (1967), Peter Hide is Professor of Sculpture and has been at the University of Alberta since 1977. A specialist in welded metal sculpture and abstraction, he is currently exploring the relationship between sculpture and architecture. He has exhibited widely and in an international context, and his work is in public collections at the Tate Gallery, London, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Alberta Gallery of Art.

Sponsors: Bentall Kennedy

Placed by Art & Design in Public Places Program of the Works International Visual Art Society (The Places)