7 × 6 in
in
cm
$500
Thauberger’s Pop and Canadian landscape influences are prominent in Kachina (Midnight). The work depicts the backside of an unidentifiable Saskatchewan building, with prairie fields stretching beyond below a late-night sky, capturing the vastness, the ruralness, and the vernacular architecture of the artist’s home province. Realism picks out the foreground, defining a leafless autumn sapling highlighted against the front-lit whitewash of the cladding surrounded by an instantly recognizable green trim. Beyond that, however, this fine detail is juxtaposed with colour banding of the surrounding landscape that, though it approaches the flatness of Thauberger’s Pop Art inspiration, nevertheless speaks instinctively to the neat rows and varied hues of many a prairie field.
| Medium | Prints |
| Signature | Signed |
| Frame | Framed |
| Condition | excellent |
| Seller | Private |
| Location | Victoria, Canada |
| Provenance | Artist; Private Collection, Victoria, Canada. |
David Thauberger is known for his paintings of the vernacular architecture and cultural icons of Saskatchewan. Together with his paintings of popular culture and postcard images of tourist meccas far and wide, his images of Saskatchewan are articulate debates involving art, culture, and how we view our world, presenting a hyper-real picture of our context that transcends regionalism while capturing the heart of what it means to be from Saskatchewan. Thauberger has become known as an iconoclastic artist, creating colourful portraits of unornate prairie buildings, legion halls, quonset huts, false-fronted shops, and inner-city bungalows.
Thauberger’s art is deeply influenced by the legacies of Pop art, modernism, and the Canadian tradition of landscape paintings, especially the Group of Seven. His paintings explore a modernist idea of flatness because, as he says, “it shows you can’t escape your own experience.” Many of Thauberger’s paintings are made using acrylic paint, which was first used by Pop artists in the 1960s to mimic the flatness of advertisements. This artistic decision is a deliberate counter to the idealized, empty landscapes of the Group of Seven that have become synonymous with Canadian national identity. He counts painters Roy De Forest, William T Wiley, and Wayne Thiebaud as his inspiration for their irreverent, pop-inflected, and anti-formalist style.
Thauberger was born in Holdfast in 1948. He studied ceramics at the University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus, where ceramic sculptor David Gilhooly served as an early mentor, inspiring Thauberger and others to create art that was rooted in their own life experience and their own geographical region. He earned his BFA in 1971 and his MA in 1972 from California State University (Sacramento). He then studied with Rudy Autio at the University of Montana in Missoula, earning his MFA in 1973.
Thauberger’s achievements were recognized recently when he was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit and again in 2017 when he received a Canada 150 Award. He was invested as a Member of the Order of Canada in 2008, was a recipient of the 2012 Queen’s Diamond Medal and the 2009 Lieutenant Governor’s Saskatchewan Artist Award, and is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. When named as a Member of the Order of Canada, he was cited for his contributions to “the promotion and preservation of Canadian heritage and folk art in the province of Saskatchewan, in addition to his work as a painter, sculptor, and educator.”
Today, David Thauberger lives and works in his native Saskatchewan.
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