bRUCE hEAD

Nationally-renowned Canadian artist Bruce Head’s life revolved completely around his art and his relationships with people, whether family, friends, or art students whom he taught over the years. He began drawing and sketching as an elementary school student in central Winnipeg, where his principal noted his talent and sent him to study at the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Saturday morning classes for students. He graduated from the University of Manitoba's School of Art in 1953.

He was among of the handful of young Manitoba artists whose work stimulated a dramatic surge in interest in contemporary art on the Canadian Prairies, and who rapidly came to represent a unique, Prairie-based visual movement. Head's insistence on the integrity of the creative process permeated his professional life. As a graphic designer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, he brought uniquely recognizable energy and bold strength to his work-- energy that also reflects consistently in his canvasses and sculptures.

He exhibited in almost every province in Canada in both group and one-man shows, and his work made its way into numerous corporate collections across the country. Reproductions of his work have been published in international publications including Graphis in Switzerland, Ideas in Japan, the Art Directors Club in New York, Montreal and Toronto, Arts Canada, Who's Who in American Art, and the International Who's Who in Art and Antiques.

Elected to the Royal Canadian Academy in the early seventies (at the time the youngest Manitoban to be elected), he took early retirement from the CBC in the late eighties, building a large studio onto his home in south Winnipeg where he worked constantly, exhibiting frequently in galleries primarily in Western Canada, and accepting occasional commissions.

Today, his work is represented in hundreds of Canadian collections, both private and public, ranging from small, select personal collections across the country to the National Gallery of Canada. Many major pieces hang in public spaces in his home province, from corporate head offices, country clubs, the government of Manitoba lobbies, to the unique circular concrete wall in the underground concourse below Canada's windiest corner at Portage and Main. More than four hundred feet in circumference, the piece is the largest concrete form created by an artist in Canada. The University of Manitoba, St. John’s College, the University of Manitoba School of Art, St. Boniface Hospital, University of Manitoba School of Medicine, province of Manitoba Art Bank, and the City of Winnipeg all shelter substantive collections of his work, many of them on visible display throughout public spaces across Winnipeg.

Aside from the concourse concrete wall, perhaps his most easily spotted public pieces can be seen in the lobby of the Woodsworth Building and the Manitoba Hydro head office lobby in downtown Winnipeg. Almost a hundred examples of his work are stored online at The Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art’s online database   (http://ccca.concordia.ca/artists/Bruce_Head).

His one-man fifty-year retrospective show in the last year of his life, a three-month solo exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, remains the largest solo show the Gallery has ever mounted, covering five decades of his art, with a simultaneously published book analyzing and documenting the works in the exhibition. Bruce Head died at the age of 78 on December 30th, 2009 in the intensive care unit at St. Boniface Hospital, the same hospital where he was born on February 14th, 1931.