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Urban Landscape / Spectators

Urban Landscape / Spectators

Ron Kostyniuk, RCA // 1992

acrylic|Aluminum|enamel on mdf
Castle Downs Arena

About

This artwork was originally created in 1992 for the Clareview Sports Complex and relocated to the Castle Downs Arena in 2019.

Alberta artist Ron Kostyniuk’s practice explores and renews the link between art and architecture. Many of his sculptural artworks employ architectural models or maquettes that act as abstracted human forms. Kostyniuk orchestrates cubes, rectangles, and spheres to reveal the human form as an architectural structural entity.

Urban Landscape / Spectators is part of Kostyniuk’s Anthropomorphic Architecture Series where the architectural forms are constructed to refer to specific people known to him.

Ron Kostyniuk, RCA

Ron Kostyniuk was born in the small community of Wakaw, Saskatchewan, in 1941. He studied at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, receiving a Bachelor of Art in Biology and a Bachelor of Education in 1963. He taught high school biology in schools in Manitoba and Alberta while beginning his artistic practice. Kostyniuk later went to Edmonton’s University of Alberta, where he completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1969, and to the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a Master of Science in 1970 and a Master of Fine Arts in 1971. He became a professor at the University of Calgary that same year.

Kostyniuk’s art is influenced by his experience on the prairies as well as his interest in science. Images incorporate geometric shapes, architectural forms, and prairie icons like grain elevators with themes of history and change. Of Kostyniuk’s recent “Saskatchewan Road Map” series, Joan Kendrick wrote in New Currents in Teaching, “Recalling his background in biology, Kostyniuk speaks of systems and how they fluctuate in seeking equilibrium….His work is an act of preservation. In documenting this period of transition and marking the sorrow, he invites us to reflect. He is able to translate his experience of a Western subject into sculpture that allows us to share in his vision while making our own associations.”

Kostyniuk has exhibited his work in Canada and internationally. His work is represented in collections throughout North America and Europe. Kostyniuk has received several commissions, including for public murals in Winnipeg and Calgary and sculptures in Canada and in Algeria.

In 1975, he was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Art. In 2011, a retrospective exhibition of Kostyniuk’s work from the 1960s to the present was held at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago.

Castle Downs Arena
Castle Downs Arena 11520 153 Ave NW
Edmonton
T5X 5S5

Urban Landscape / Spectators

About

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