Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape

Add a Comment by Rebecca Bollwitt Friday, January 24th, 2025 — 9:57am PST

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The Vancouver Art Gallery is launching a new year-long exhibition about one of the most significant artists in Canada’s history, Emily Carr (1871–1945). Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape will feature more than 20 of the artist’s signature forest paintings, recognizing the natural world as one of Carr’s lifelong inspirations.

Emily Carr:
Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape

Visitors will encounter a densely hung group of paintings of thick forest scenes faced off on the opposite wall by a single Carr painting of a clear-cut landscape with an open horizon. The exhibition deliberately draws out the physical experience of the opening and closing-off of space in Carr’s forest scenes.

When: January 25, 2025, until January 4, 2026
Where: Vancouver Art Gallery 750 Hornby St, Vancouver
Admission: Purchase tickets online or onsite.
- Visit on the first Friday night of every month for free admission with Free First Friday Nights.

Carr captured the coastal forest landscape in a way previously unseen in British Columbian art. Driven by a Romantic desire for a spiritual union with nature, she was able to combine her knowledge of avant-garde Modernism from her studies in Europe with a deep engagement with the rainforests of BC’s West Coast to create a unique and powerful vision.

In 2010 Miss604 got a tour of the art gallery's vault where hundreds of Emily Carr works were stored — In 2010 Miss604 got a tour of the art gallery’s vault where hundreds of Emily Carr works were stored

Richard Hill, the Smith Jarislowsky Senior Curator of Canadian Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, describes his inspiration for the exhibition: “From my earliest encounters with Carr’s paintings I was struck by the density of her forests; not only the thickness of the growth, but the way she paints it. In her later works she stylizes trees and bushes into massed, solid volumes, often closing off space—or at least making it challenging to project yourself into the space of the painting. Recently, I wondered what her treatment of space might tell us about her aspiration to connect with nature. It seemed to me that spatially the paintings both promise and resist that impulse.”

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