Ian Wallace wins the 2022 Audain Prize for Visual Art

Ian Wallace has been a mainstay of the Vancouver art scene for almost six decades as a photographer, painter and teacher. He’s enjoyed international success, won the Governor General’s Award for the Visual Arts and is a Member of the Order of Canada.

Now the 79-year-old can add the Audain Prize to his curriculum vitae.

Wallace was named the winner of the 2022 prize at a luncheon Wednesday at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver.

“It is a great honour to make this award to one of B.C.’s greatest living artists — Ian Wallace,” said Michael Audain, chairman of the Audain Foundation.

“Besides having an outstanding international reputation, Mr. Wallace has had a considerable influence on younger artists.”

The Audain Prize for Visual Art is one of the Canada’s top cultural awards. Wallace takes home $100,000 for winning the award, which has been bestowed on B.C.’s “most distinguished artists” since 2004.

The list of winners of the Audain Prize reads like a who’s who of B.C. art, from painters like E.J. Hughes, Gordon Smith and Takao Tanabe to photo-conceptual artists like Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham and Stan Douglas.

“It’s really great to be on the list,” said Wallace. “To follow in the footsteps of the artists that have already received the prize.”

Wallace is one of the giants of local photo-conceptualism, which has found broad success internationally.

“Back in the 60s there was a movement called conceptual art that was very much linked to a more intellectual, literary approach to art, that went beyond making objects and painting and such,” he explains.

“I was a painter, doing very kind of severe abstract monochrome paintings at the time, but was very interested in what was going on with conceptual art.

“So I kind of modified my practice. I shifted from doing purely abstract painting to doing certain kinds of things, what I call concept pieces, various kind of deconstruction of painting and such that was starting to make sense to me.”

Wallace was influenced by conceptual artists like Americans Ed Rucha and Dan Graham, as well as local legend Ian Baxter& and the N.E. Thing Company, an art collective Baxter& founded in the late 1960s.

He also acknowledges the influence of peers like Wall, Graham and Christos Dikeakos. But Wallace’s art hasn’t just been photography, he’s mixed it with painting.

“Chris Dikeakos did this really important show in 1969 called The Photo Show in which we exhibited our photography,” he explains.

“But I remained interested in painting. So my work since then has been almost a contradictory relationship between photography and painting, monochrome abstract painting. I kind of put the two together, and I think they work really well together, from my point of view anyways.

“That’s been my defining modus operandi since then, since the ’60s, early ’70s.”

Wallace was born in Shoreham, England, during the Second World War, and moved to Canada as a baby.

“My father was a soldier in the war, and met my mother in London,” he said. “Before the war was over, we moved back, in 1944. I had my picture in the Winnipeg Free Press in my father’s arms, as the first war baby to come to Canada.

“They called us war babies because we were the children of Canadian soldiers and English mothers.”

In fact his mother had been born in Vancouver, and spent part of her childhood in a waterfront cottage built by her father on Alma Street just north of Point Grey Road. Against all odds, it’s still there.

“He built it in the early 20s,” he said. “I don’t know if my mother was born in the house … (but) my mother was taken back to England when she was quite young by her mother.”

His family lived in Midway in the B.C. interior before moving North Vancouver in 1952. Wallace was always interested in art, taking night classes in high school at the old Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr).

“We had no money, we weren’t a wealthy family,” he said.

“So I was thinking about (getting) an education that would get me a decent paying job. I went to UBC. I studied literature at first, but ended up moving over at art history. I had very good teachers — B.C. Binning was the head of the department then, in the early 60s.

“When I got my master’s degree at UBC they hired me to teach art history. So I was on full faculty when I was 24. I just really bust my ass and worked really hard.”

He chuckles.

“I did all the things that needed to be done at the time, including writing reviews for The Sun and Province.”

He always worked on his own art outside teaching.

“I exhibited my first painting at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1965, in an open-juried kind of salon exhibition that they had,” he said. “And I’ve exhibited work consistency ever since.”

But he left UBC in 1970.

“I thought I’d spent too much time in Vancouver, so I thought I’d better get out and see the rest of the world,’ he said.

“So I moved to London in 1970. I quit my job at UBC. Everybody thought I was nuts to do that, (but) I did. I had a Canada Council grant and moved to London.

“Stayed there for a little over a year, got homesick and came back to Vancouver and got a job at was then the Vancouver School of Art in 1972, and taught there until 1998.”

His first European show was at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in France in 1973.

“It was a show produced by External Affairs, the Canadian government,” he said.

“So people were gradually becoming aware that something was happening in contemporary Canadian art. Not just Vancouver, but also Montreal and Toronto, right across the country. It was a group show, with General Idea (from Toronto), Ian Baxter&, etc.”

While teaching at Emily Carr, Wallace brought American conceptual artist Dan Graham to town on a visiting artists program. This proved to be his big break in Europe.

“He got to know everybody in Vancouver, and started to talk about us when he was in Europe to various galleries that he was involved with in Europe,” said Wallace.

“Then they contacted us. European curators were coming to Vancouver to see what was going on, doing studio visits. I think the first show in Germany was by Rudiger Schottle (gallery) in Munich, Jeff Wall had it.

“I got invited to exhibit at Rudiger Schottle and then Johnen & Schottle in Cologne, and it just went on from there. In Paris I had the Gabrielle Maubrie gallery, for almost 30 years, and I’m still showing at Greta Meert gallery (in Brussels, Belgium), where I’m been showing since 1979.

“I just did a show there recently, just this spring, in May. Jeff Wall has a show there right now. It all continues, with more success than one would expect.”

While his art career was taking off, he also found time to play bass with one of Vancouver’s top new wave acts in the late 1970s, the U-J3RK5 (pronounced U-Jerks). The band included fellow artists Wall and Graham, as well as longtime CBC Radio fixture David Wisdom.

He took early retirement from Emily Carr in 1998 to concentrate on his art.

“I’ve basically been highballing it, and producing a lot of work for the past 20-some-odd years now, since I retired,” he said.

“To do exhibitions overseas, when I was showing in Europe and the States, I had to leave Vancouver. So I just took early retirement at 55, and focused on my professional exhibition program.”

It’s worked out.

jmackie@postmedia.com