Douglas Coupland: The New Ice Age

Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present The New Ice Age, Douglas Coupland’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery.

The New Ice Age is a painting exhibition grounded in three realities. First, it is a continuation of Douglas Coupland’s interest in ideas around ecology, particularly oil and plastics. Second, it is an exciting and unexpected departure into painterliness and the use of gesture. Third, it is a direct continuation of the artist’s decades-long investigation into the Canadian landscape.

“A few years back I drove past a corn field in August and thought of how lovely and old-fashioned it seemed, but a bit down the road there was a sign reading: ‘Monsanto mon863.’ I realized it was a genetically modified corn variant being grown in that field. And suddenly it wasn’t just a corn field I was seeing—it had become something else, as if a hex or spell had been cast on it. Similarly, I was returning from Munich in 2021 and looked down out the plane window at Baffin Island and I realized that all of those glaciers and icebergs I was seeing down there had also had a spell cast on them, just like the cornfields, and that they were part of what I see as a new Ice Age. I could no longer look at them or the landscape the old way.”

Coupland’s painted icebergs indeed feel as if a spell has been cast on them. Moving away from his normal full spectrum of colors, he has created lurid tableaux that feel haunted and possibly radioactive. He has also created his own alphabet of painting techniques, with references to Léger, Cubism, even B.C. Binning, which collectively lend the works a sense of being lost in time. And yet they are utterly of the twenty-first century.

Douglas Coupland is a graduate of Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, as well as the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo, Japan. He also attended the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan, Italy. His work has been the subject of two major museum retrospectives: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Royal Ontario Museum, and Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and Munich’s Villa Stuck. His work has been included in numerous international exhibitions including: Beyond Words, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, 2023; Art in the Age of Anxiety, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2020; Hello, Robot., Hyundai Motorstudio Busan, 2022, Nouveau Musée Bienne, 2020, and Vitra Design Museum, 2017; Human Learning: What Machines Teach Us, Kiasma, Castelnau-le-Lez, 2022 and Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, 2020; The Extreme Present, presented by Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch, Miami, 2019; 24/7: A Wake up Call for our Non-Stop World, Somerset House, London, 2019; I Was Raised on the Internet, MCA Chicago, 2018; Electronic Superhighway, curated by Omar Kholeif, Whitechapel Gallery, London and MAAT, Lisbon, Portugal, 2017. Coupland’s work can be found in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), University of British Columbia (Vancouver), Museum of Canadian History (Gatineau), Glenbow Museum (Calgary), Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston), the Albright Knox (Buffalo), and the Confederation Centre (Charlottetown). He is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the Order of British Columbia, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.