Lot 56
  • 56

Douglas Coupland b. 1961

Estimate
15,000 - 25,000 CAD
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Description

  • Douglas Coupland
  • Bill Gates
  • each signed, titled, dated 1995 and numbered on the stretcher on the reverse
  • 4 liquid polymer emulsion silkscreened on canvas
  • 82.6 by 58.4 cm.
  • 32½ by 23 in.

Provenance

Private Collection, Sudbury

Catalogue Note

In 1991, Doug Coupland gave us Generation X, followed by a string of novels and other publications, such as the two-volume Souvenir of Canada, Terry (the Terry Fox story), and Marshall McLuhan, a punchy and entertaining biography, several films, television productions, and a line of clothing for Roots, each a commentary on popular culture.

But Coupland graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and he never really left or abandoned his origins in the visual arts. Indeed, he has been one of the most productive and inventive artists of the past two decades, with numerous series of paintings, public sculpture commissions practically from coast to coast, and a prolific and prodigious use of every medium he could lay his hands on. His variations on the silkscreen prints of paintings by the Group of Seven are ingenious creations, and his latest paintings have been of six-foot square Quick Response Codes -- not in black and white but in blazing colours. And you can read them with your Blackberry, too.

This quartet of portraits of Bill Gates, set against a backdrop of IBM blue, is a unique work done in 1995.  Although created in the pop tradition of silkscreen portraiture made famous by Andy Warhol, Coupland's are each subtly different. The result is that the four together create a much more resonant statement about the world's richest man, as Gates then was.