Looking Up

Dumontier, Michael

Butler, Paul

Winnipeg Art Gallery

From two of the founding members of the influential collective, the Royal Art Lodge
Constructive Abandonment is a series of small paintings featuring surreal vignettes with animals and children weighed down by the pressures of life. With absurdly comedic interactions, the text varies from straightforward to even more abstract and nonsensical than the images that it accompanies. The paintings reference child's play or literature and some are seemingly without reference, completely untethered. 
Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber are founding members of the Royal Art Lodge. Since the dissolution of the influential Winnipeg art collective, Dumontier and Farber continue to work and create art together. Constructive Abandonment is a partnership not only of two of today's great contemporary artists but also of cohesive dissonance. Pages that could be forgettable one-liners become investigations into intellect and our ability to draw correlations between contradictory elements in a single image.

Constructive Abandonment

Farber, Neil

Arts & Photography

Drawn and Quarterly

Paintings by two of Canada's most influential contemporary fine artists Animals with Sharpies is a collection of paintings with hand-lettered texts. In each painting, Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber have depicted an animal holding a Sharpie, ostensibly writing a message. These messages are varied in nature: political and religious tracts, confessions, recipes, arithmetic problems, and more. Above all, these paintings are funny, but they are also startlingly poignant and jarring for the humanness of the suffering and longing depicted in these animals' simple words. Dumontier and Farber, two of the founding members of the highly influential art collective the Royal Art Lodge, have been collaborating on art projects for more than fifteen years. Their collaborative style is unique from that found in their individual works and is respected internationally: they've exhibited together in France, Switzerland, Canada, the United States, Belgium, Spain, England, and Germany. Dumontier and Farber have a strong sense of the absurd, but they are also deeply insightful about the world in which their art is created. Animals with Sharpies is a mixture of new, previously unseen pieces and older pieces.

Animals with Sharpies

Two of Canada's most famous visual artists take on the book medium in their own hilarious way Library is a collection of paintings by two of Canada's most influential contemporary artists, Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber. From the simple premise of the book title comes a series of images that are laugh-out-loud funny. A collection of book covers adorned with titles painted in simple handwritten fonts are displayed on brightly colored hardboard. Each book forms part of an ongoing series Dumontier and Farber started in 2009. In Dumontier and Farber's Library, titles like I Lost the Human Race, Change Your Relationship to Your Unchangeable Past, and I Have a Medical Condition That Makes It So I Don't Have to Talk to You offer surprising and astute observations, all in the duo's characteristic deadpan style. The simplicity of the shapes and text evokes an immediate but lasting profundity, with each piece causing one to wonder about the thoughts that roam their consciousness, and the books that take up residence on their--and our--shelves. Dumontier and Farber are founding members of the influential art collective the Royal Art Lodge, and have been collaborating on art projects for more than fifteen years, exhibiting internationally. Library is playful and insightful as it pokes and prods at the human condition.

Library

History & Criticism

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Books by Dumontier, Michael