Sold for: $70,000

PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the Artist
Collection of Roy L. Heenan, OC, Montreal

LITERATURE
"Greg Curnoe," National Gallery of Canada, https://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artist.php?iartistid=1236, accessed March 7, 2015

London, Ontario artist Greg Curnoe is remembered as a uniquely gifted, constantly experimental artist and as a catalytic community leader. He was a brilliant and intuitive colourist and a staunch supporter of local and regional culture in southwestern Ontario from the 1960s until his tragic death in 1992. Curnoe did not separate life and art. As he put it in 1976, “Art doesn’t change me; it’s what I’m doing. It’s rarely that an influence from my art determines the way I live; it’s usually the other way around. The way I live determines what I do in my art – if they can be distinguished, and I don’t think they can really be distinguished.” More than any other image from his extensive oeuvre, it is the bicycle that bespeaks the unity of art and life for Greg Curnoe.

Always the leader, the spark, Curnoe founded a bike club - the London Centennial Wheelers. He made his own bikes and exercised his passion for them across the eclectic range of his art production. Individual bike wheels painted in watercolour became beautiful colour wheels, sometimes with tongue-in-cheek references to abstract paintings that take this form, such as those by Claude Tousignant - for example, Tousignant Red (Small Flange Campagnolo Hub) (1979), or in homage to Marcel Duchamp’s famous readymade, the Bicycle Wheel of 1913, as in Sanouillet No. 1 (1979). A hallmark of Curnoe’s approach is the happy inclusion of three-dimensional, sculptural forms in an expanded sense of painting and assemblage. Bicycles figure in this realm too: Zeus 10-Speed (1972), for example, is a three-dimensional painting of a favourite bike. Many of Curnoe’s self-portraits present him in full cycling gear. Acclaimed for his unique use of text in and as images, we can also easily imagine Curnoe’s experience on his bike, in London, Ontario, in the opening lines of a collage from 1962: "Blue Sky / Richmond St. / Manhole / Heat / Elbows."

As its title suggests, Funny Bicycle stands out even in Curnoe’s work. Akin to all his art but more startlingly so, this machine is a hybrid. The frame is that of a "real" bike, but the wheels are wooden circles that function more as meditations on the colour wheel than as conveyances. Seen from the side, the prominent front-gear disc has morphed into an exercise in colour harmonies. The perimeters of the painted wheels frame potentially dynamic circles of colour reminiscent of (and worthy of) Robert Delaunay’s or František Kupka’s experiments in abstraction near the beginning of the twentieth century. To call this a sculpture seems inadequate: the work seems almost weightless, a celebration of movement and colour that one could "ride" in the fullest sense.

So revered is Curnoe’s love of bicycles that contemporary artist Paul Butler undertook the Greg Curnoe Bike Project as an artist-in-residence project at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2011. Rebuilding Curnoe’s favourite bike, which Curnoe characteristically named after one of his own artworks: Close the 49th Parallel ETC., Butler then went on tour through Curnoe’s past as a way to explore the London artist’s unique regionalism. So what is funny about Funny Bicycle? It is the lesson in all of Curnoe’s work - that art is pretty close to life and vice versa. It is appropriate that the bicycle is again the messenger of this central aspect of Curnoe’s legacy.

We thank Mark Cheetham, Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, for contributing the above essay.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars