Persuasive Visions:
17th Century Dutch and Flemish Masterworks and Contemporary Reflections

Painting in the Netherlands and Flanders enjoyed an exceptional variety and richness in the seventeenth century. A robust economy, international trade and a prosperous middle class supported a busy art market, including major painters that painted for the market. Several genres- among them portraiture, still life, landscape and marinescape-dominated the painting of this period.

Persuasive Visions incorporates works from the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery and The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, with important loans from a private collection. These are exhibited in contrast with works in similar genres by contemporary practitioners, including portrait photographs by Thomas Ruff; a major sculpture, Mouthful (2008), by Liz Magor; Jeff Wall’s landscape lightboxes; and a new sculptural installation by Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, which has been commissioned for this presentation