Renée Van Halm is a Canadian contemporary visual artist born in Haarlemmermeer, the Netherlands and immigrated to Canada in 1953.
Exhibitions
Renée Van Halm has been featured in over 30 solo exhibitions including numerous exhibitions at the S.L. Simpson Gallery and Birch Contemporary in Toronto, Ontario, as well as Equinox Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Notable exhibitions include:
Reverse Engineering at the S.L. Simpson Gallery and Birch Contemporary in Toronto, ON
Cross-Cutting/Inside Out, a 35-year survey exhibition of her works on paper at the Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, BC
Shape of Things at the West Vancouver Museum, Vancouver, BC
Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions such as Aurora Borealis at the Centre international d'art contemporain, Montréal, weak thought at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Architypes at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver and the Embassy of Canada, Tokyo, Cut and Paste at the Equinox Gallery, The Poetics of Space at the Vancouver Art Gallery, New Monuments Forget the Future at Birch Contemporary, Return of the Image at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, NB, Form Follows Fiction at UTAC, Toronto, and Elusive Utopias at the Judith and Norman Alix Gallery, Sarnia, ON.
Art practice
Renée Van Halm has a long-standing interest in the history of painting and the production of hybrid objects that blur the space between painting, sculpture and architecture. She is deeply invested the material processes of painting and the traditional terms of its construction. Of her artistic practice, Van Halm has written: "Cultural history and how we represent and inhabit architecture are fundamental to my work. Over the years I have looked at many subjects that reflect on art and design practices through the genres of still life and landscape as well as decor, abstraction and pattern. I am drawn to the expectations that underscore these preoccupations. Over thirty year ago I began to work with the architecture found in early Renaissance painting, from which I built life sized three-dimensional structures. This work led me to consider how architectural space governs contemporary experience. This continues in my current work where I work with images culled from mainstream fashion and decor magazines which I manipulate and juxtapose in new compositions. These form the basis of paintings. My ongoing interests are in how we as individuals, define and negotiate our private experiences in thespaces where we live." Van Halm often incorporates art historical, painterly references, as well as allusions to architectural history. Art critic Robin Laurence writes: "Her art takes on presence and absence, private and public, intimacy and grandeur, modernism, pre-modernism, and postmodernism, all in a manner that is gorgeously painterly and rigorously critical. The sources of Van Halm’s imagery range from early Renaissance paintings to contemporary real-estate ads, and from interior design publications to her own photographs and collages."
