“Postcards from the Heart: Selections from the Brigitte and Henning Freybe Collection”

In January this year, the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) announced the promised gift of 122 works of modern and contemporary art from esteemed local collectors and cultural patrons Brigitte and Henning Freybe. With pieces spanning a range of media, materials and decades by a raft of cutting-edge North American and European artists, the gift stands as the largest and most important of its kind in the gallery’s history. It is also remarkable for both the daring and commitment the artworks reveal about the Freybes as collectors. Much of the museum-quality and museum-scale art the couple has chosen to live with daily is difficult— challenging viewers visually, conceptually and emotionally.

Curated by Eva Respini, the VAG’s director of curatorial programs (and, at the time of this writing, co-interim CEO), and curatorial assistant Andrea Valentine-Lewis, “Postcards from the Heart” celebrates the Freybes’ gift with a selection of some 30 of its most striking and significant works. While the collection is wide-ranging and diverse, both visually and conceptually, the art on display in this exhibition is organized around a few unifying themes, such as the transformative use artists make of everyday materials. Other “thematics” include the ways in which histories—especially tragic histories—are told. On a lighter note, the amusing appropriation of found images and objects is also highlighted.

Ordinariness transformed is evident in the first gallery viewers enter. Jeff Wall’s backlit Cibachrome transparency, Cuttings, which depicts three bundles and a bag of pruned tree branches lying in an indifferently ugly yard (concrete patio, algae-slimed wooden fence), hangs opposite Tara Donovan’s marvellously unexpected Untitled (Toothpicks). This free-standing, hip-high, minimal ist cube, composed of hundreds of thousands of wooden toothpicks, is—we’re told—held together entirely by surface tension. Hanging on the far wall of this room is Frank Stella’s Piaski III, a large abstraction that is part relief sculpture, part hard-edge painting in muted autumnal colours. From the artist’s “Polish Village” series, it is composed of fragile materials, that is, paint on felt or canvas mounted on corrugated cardboard. The ephemeral nature of Stella’s materials seems to be at odds with his architectonic forms. It is—however, in tragic accord with his source: photographs and drawings of wooden synagogues in eastern Poland destroyed by the Nazis.

Stella’s Holocaust reference is echoed by a modestly constructed yet enormously moving photo installation in the next gallery, Christian Boltanski’s Reliquaire. Here, stacked metal boxes, their surfaces scratched and oxidized, form a kind of altar on which are mounted six larger metal boxes. Standing upright, these larger forms serve as frames for individual portraits—blurred images of Jewish children. (One of Boltanski’s sources was a historic photograph of children celebrating the Jewish holiday Purim.) The faces are spotlit by homely gooseneck lamps; at the same time, they are made more ghostly, more spectral by thin screens of fabric. As with so many of his Holocaust-referenced works, Boltanski honours the dead while evoking a tragic contest of opposites—presence and absence, light and darkness, reverence and unspeakable horror.

Prevailing throughout this room are themes of dispossession, forced migration and colonialism. With its black and white images of a procession of striding (and sometimes disintegrating) figures, their belongings piled on their heads, William Kentridge’s diptych, Refugees (1 God’s Opinion is Unknown; 2 Leaning on Air), draws on both historic and contemporary sources to call up the violence and tyranny underlying the African diaspora. The images themselves, based on 2012 newspaper photos of Rwandan refugees, are powerfully expressive. So is the way they are constructed: some 77 fragments of 26 woodblock prints are collaged into a coherent whole, held together by aluminum pins.

Standing between the Boltanski and the Kentridge works is Brian Jungen’s 2000, a “totem pole” composed of commercially manufactured golf bags. This towering sculpture, again illustrating the idea of the transformative use of everyday materials, cleverly mimics Kwakwaka’wakw crest figures while also alluding to the proposed golf course that triggered the 1990 Oka crisis. More broadly, it addresses the ways in which settler cultures continue to steal and dishonour Indigenous lands and sacred sites for far less than sacred reasons.

The third gallery in the exhibition appears to be unified by whiteness and brightness, with signal works by Wolfgang Laib, Lee Ufan and a few members of the California Light and Space movement. Mary Corse is represented here and so is Peter Alexander. Helen Pashgian’s translucent white acrylic sculpture, Untitled (Column), seems to be lit from within with wavery bars of colour that shift and change as the viewer walks around it. An appealing, untitled work by Pier Paolo Calzolari hangs in studied opposition to the synthetic materials and perceptual manipulations of the California works. Calzolari’s materials are Arte Povera simple: salt and oil pastel on a white ground, in front of which an egg dangles, casting a subtly moving shadow while making a sly reference to the long history of the egg tempura medium.

Dominating the next gallery is Robert Rauschenberg’s Sea Cow Treaty (Spread), a large and important assemblage or “Combine” of images and objects with a working water feature. (Respini has identified it as “leitmotif” for the exhibition.) Circulated by an unseen electric pump, two streams of water—one dyed orangey-red; the other, turquoise blue—pour out of twinned metal taps into conjoined metal buckets. The buckets sit on a shelf mounted on a fabric-onwood ground of coloured rectangles and photographic transfer images. These images are apparently sourced from mass media and range from ocean waves and blooming cacti to running shoes and a helmeted football player. With its nonsensical title and unexpected juxtapositions, Rauschenberg’s assemblage establishes a mood of pop-surreal humour and neo-Dada absurdity, with which other works in the room amiably converse. Jerry Pethick’s Desert Flowers, Cactus and Skylight (exploded sculpture), a wall-mounted collection of weird and wonderful plastic objects, reminds us of that late and much-missed artist’s quirky inventiveness. Rodney Graham’s large-scale colour photograph, My Late Early Styles (Part I, The Middle Period), in which Graham has posed himself as a bougie artist in front of a salon hang of incompetently Picasso-esque paintings, is amusing and clever. Perhaps a bit too clever. (Graham, too, is sorely missed.)

In the show’s final gallery, which includes a large, gorgeous aquatint by Julie Mehretu and a beguiling short film by Tacita Dean, the curators have consolidated a theme of transformation quite literally with a transformation mask by Kwakwaka’wakw artist Walas Gwa’yam, Chief Beau Dick. In this spectacular ceremonial work, a large Raven mask opens to reveal a “hawk-faced sun effigy.”

My only complaint in this gallery is that the sound component of Dean’s film—the nattering and chittering of magpies moving about in the bare branches outside the artist’s studio window—is overwhelmed by the booming and thrashing soundtrack of a completely separate exhibition, Lucy Raven’s Murderers Bar, installed nearby. (Lucy Raven’s soundtrack also overwhelms the plashing of running water in Rauschenberg’s work, another gallery away.)

That disruption aside, I am filled with admiration for the way outstanding works from the Freybes’ collection have been organized and honoured in this show. In “Postcards from the Heart,” the power and adventurousness of their vision are beautifully underscored by the generosity of their gift, not just to the VAG but to all of us— Vancouverites, British Columbians, Canadians. ❚

“Postcards from the Heart: Selections from the Brigitte and Henning Freybe Collection” is on exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery from April 18, 2025, to October 5, 2025.

Robin Laurence is an award winning writer, critic and curator based in Vancouver.