Andrew Dutkewych holds a BA from the former Philadelphia College of Art (1966) and a degree from the Slade School of Fine Art in London (1968). A professor at Concordia University, he has shown his work in various galleries and institutions, including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, Galerie Christiane Chassay in Montreal and EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe. The minimalist quality of his earliest work, produced in the 1970s, was later replaced by an emphasis on highlighting textures and the purity of materials such as bronze, wood, cement, steel and stone. His pieces tend to feature fragments of the human body, whether presented simultaneously in isolation from and in relation to other parts to create a dynamic space, or placed in paradoxical circumstances like the heads in Memory (1988), which gaze in opposite directions from beneath the legs of chairs. Among his architecturally integrated works are Entre nous (“between us”) at Pointe-à-Callière, the Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History, and Autour et de très près (“around and up close”), a fountain at the Université du Québec à Montréal featuring a stone slab resting on top of four vertical sculptures.
(Source : Historical Dictionary of Quebec Sculpture in the 20th Century)
Artwork description
This sculpture is made up of three elements: a round bronze column, an urn and a carved stone bench. From a mass of fragmented stone volumes emerges a column that represents two negative space profiles that face each other. Poised at the foot of the sculpture is an inverted urn. The bench sits further away, near the entrance to the museum.
The work evokes human interaction throughout history. The column is inspired by mooring piles, the fragments of stone symbolize the site’s historical interpretation chain and the inverted urn is a metaphor and testament to the wealth of culture. A close reading of the column’s profile reveals two silhouettes of human figures that come together to give the work its title: Entre nous, between us.