WITNESS: Histories of Conflict in the War Art of Bill MacDonnell

Exhibition Details

Curated by Dick Averns –

Conflict is difficult to confront yet essential to address if humanity is to better itself. This territory is adeptly navigated by artist Bill MacDonnell, whose large-scale paintings serve as a foil to human tendencies to overlook, forget, or simply avoid conflicted histories.

MacDonnell is not simply invoking the folly of history repeating itself, but cites what is known as cultural amnesia, drawing to our attention dangerous slippages of social memory. To counter this – having toured four continents, twice been deployed as an official war artist, and visited numerous battlefields under his own steam – MacDonnell’s Witness paintings offer poignant and poetic avenues to recalibrate our collective past and future.

With a knack for depicting pivotal sites of rupture, Histories of Conflict in the War Art of Bill MacDonnell navigates diverse geographies and theatres, including bookends to the Great War and veiled mass graves from World War II. He also depicts architectural cornerstones central to the Spanish Civil War, 1948 Arab-Israeli War, First Indochina War, Yugoslav Wars, Rwandan genocide, and the War on Terror. With richly layered paintings and coded texts, Bill MacDonnell appears as the consummate, “philosophical documentarian of history.” (Paul Kuhn).

Bill MacDonnell’s expansive exposition of war art allows us to see a master of both paint and metaphor, realism and abstraction, in this solo exhibition that shuns obvious violence. Witness: Histories of Conflict in the War Art of Bill MacDonnell should not be mistaken as landscape paintings, rather we find sites of civil collapse at risk of being contextually orphaned and diluted by, or within, peoples’ fading memories.

As one of Canada’s most senior war artists, Bill MacDonnell helped establish a vanguard in contemporary war art that moves beyond traditions of overt memorializing, portraiture, and declarative commemoration. Instead, his art engages with what he notes as “failure, and pivotal sites of empires’ transitions,” an artful re-dressing of nationalistic contestation and power-broking.

The value of art is itself a contested ground, as too are the values that constantly redefine what art is. But assuredly, in the wide-ranging fields of Bill MacDonnell’s war art, his aesthetic and intellectual prowess delivers conflicted values to challenge us all

Image Gallery

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