Alex Colville: Return

Alex Colville: Eternal Return builds upon the extensive body of literature and exhibitions about one of Canada’s most renowned, award-winning artists. Beginning with Embarkation (1994), this book, which accompanies a traveling exhibition and a Website, showcases Colville’s paintings and prints of the last ten years and discusses them in relation to select earlier pieces and the several contexts in which they were created. It suggests that his creative process and his new finished work constitute a personal mode of witnessing, an essential visual testimony in response to trauma. Alex Colville was a Canadian war artist, sent to Europe to chronicle the events of the Second World War. He was one of three painters admitted to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as it was being liberated, and Alex Colville: Eternal Return proposes that Colville's life work as an artist has been to return artistically and metaphorically to the extraordinary horrors that he experienced in Germany in 1945. To express this unimaginable chaos, Colville sought order, which he found in an artistic style defined as "magic realism."