Dennis Geden

The Art Gallery of Sudbury invites you to the opening of an exhibition of paintings by senior North Bay visual artist Dennis Geden. The exhibition includes 10 oil paintings completed within the past decade. Three works, John Rae: Arctic Explorer, 2018, John Buchan, 2014, and Ralph Smith: Trapper, 2017, are portraits raising the stories of arcane figures, historical and contemporary.

Dennis Geden’s mysterious paintings test all five classical genres of the traditional art form at the same time. Each painting is at once a history painting, a portrait, a landscape, a still life, and, by virtue of the consistent repetition of the artist’s own idiosyncratic figurative style, strangely generic.

Titles of the paintings or texts included within the picture field start the viewer off on a narrative path, and figures in the paintings point to or display objects and symbols that seem to be significant — but for the contemporary viewer, the suggested story-telling is rarely complete or self-contained.

Dennis Geden is a senior visual artist, born and raised in North Bay, where he continues to reside and maintain his primary studio. He attended art school in Montreal at what is now Concordia University. He travels often and has resided for extended periods in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Paris, and particularly in London UK.

The artist’s studio work and research interests focus primarily on contemporary and historical figurative/narrative art. His paintings and prints have been exhibited throughout Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. He has participated in artist residencies at Atelier Desjobert, Paris, France; Curwen Studio, London, UK; Fringe Research, Toronto, Canada; and Studenica Monastery in the former Yugoslavia.

Dennis Geden has been awarded commissions from the Government of Ontario and the Art Gallery of Ontario to create major visual artworks, and he is the recipient of research/production grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Major survey exhibitions of his work have toured to public institutions across Canada, and have been presented at Canada House, London, UK, and the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, France, with assistance from Canadian External Affairs.

Works by Dennis Geden are held in notable public collections including Tate, London, England; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France; Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Canada; Corvallis Collection, Oregon State University, USA; Art Gallery of Sudbury | Galerie d’art de Sudbury, Canada; Canada Council’s Art Bank, Ottawa; Simon Fraser University Art Collection, Burnaby, Canada; and Curwen Studio Archive, Cambridge, England.