Ydessa Hendeles

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ydessa Hendeles , 2012

Ydessa Hendeles (born December 27, 1948 in Marburg , Hessen ) is a Canadian artist , art therapist , art collector , gallery owner , curator and patron .

Under the name The Ydessa Gallery , she founded a gallery in her hometown of Toronto in 1980 , which provided significant impetus for cultural life in the province of Ontario . With the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation she opened the first privately financed exhibition hall for contemporary art in Canada in 1988 .

Life

Ydessa Hendeles was born in Marburg in 1948 as the only daughter of the Jewish couple Dorothy Hendeles, née Zweigel (also Dorka Dwora Cwajgel , 1916–2012), and Jacob Hendeles (1917–1987), who had survived Auschwitz . Her Polish parents had lived there with other family members as displaced persons for some time in the post-war period before they emigrated to Canada in the spring of 1951. In Toronto, her father became wealthy as a real estate developer. After school education is Hendeles wrote to the University of Toronto for Social and Philosophical Studies a. She obtained the title of Bachelor of this subject in 1969. In the Department of Fine Arts of this university she taught later (2001) as an adjunct professor . She studied fine arts at the New School of Art (Toronto) and art therapy until 1984 at the Toronto Institute of Art Therapy .

At the end of the 1960s she rebelled against the sheltered and luxurious conditions of her parents' home. She moved out of her family's estate in elegant Rosedale. In downtown Toronto, where she lived afterwards and enjoyed the life of the local bohemians , she kept the company of artists like Michael Snow . She tried to earn a living regardless of her parents' fortune by working in a cocktail bar and in retail.

From 1980 to 1989 she ran a contemporary art gallery in her hometown under the name The Ydessa Gallery , after having worked there for a while as a designer of kitchens and bathrooms. In the gallery she presented Canadian artists such as Rodney Graham , Jeff Wall , Jana Sterbak and Ken Lum . With the installation Canada by Christian Boltanski , she opened the exhibitions of her Ydessa Hendels Art Foundation in 1988 . This art foundation owned the former hall of a uniform factory with a size of around 1200 square meters in the center of Toronto. In the early 1990s Hendeles began to integrate her own artistic projects into the exhibitions of the artists she presented. After around 25 years, in 2012, she closed the exhibition hall she ran.

In 2009 she completed her doctoral thesis in Curatorial Compositions under Mieke Bal (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Theory and Interpretation, ASCA) at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam “cum laude”. In her dissertation she also analyzed the joint exhibition Partners , which took place in 2003 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and in which, in connection with her 2002 work The Teddy Bear Project , she impressively staged the Hitler figure Him, created by Maurizio Cattelan in 2001 and acquired by her would have.

The art critic Georg Imdahl said about her works that were created up to 2018, especially with a view to the former exhibition of the work Death To Pigs in the Kunsthalle Wien , that Hendeles had developed the gift of the "uncanny", the repressed content and stories "in the To unearth symbolism of religion, national property and national identity ”. In “theatrical lighting” she immerses things in a chiaroscuro and gives her rooms and installations the aura of a mysterious narrative. From found objects of all kinds - children's books, fairy tale books and toys, photographs, prints, props and devotional objects - they arrange a real complex. She uses the art objects and cultural-historical objects, myths and fairy tales composed in it as “sociological source code”. From folklore she distilled "Patterns and mechanisms of exclusion and stigmatization" against the background of her family biography.

She received honorary doctorates from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1996 and from the University of Toronto in 2000. In 1998 she was awarded the Order of Ontario , in 2002 the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal , in 2004 the Order of Canada , and in 2012 the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal . In 2009 she donated 32 works by well-known Canadian and international artists to the Art Gallery of Ontario . The Philipps University of Marburg also awarded her an honorary doctorate for the quality of her curatorial work in October 2017.

Hendeles lives and works in Toronto and New York City . From her divorced marriage to a Toronto attorney, she has a son, Jason Neinstein Hendeles.

Exhibitions (selection)

font

  • Curatorial Compositions , Dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2009 ( PDF ).

literature

  • Thomas Weski: Ydessa Hendeles. The Teddy Bear Project . Walther König, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-8837-5756-8 .
  • Brigitte van der Sande: Partners. Ydessa Hendeles's Holocaust Memorial . In: Review , September 30, 2004, pp. 1-5 ( PDF ).
  • Hendeles, Ydessa . In: Gillian Holmes: Who's Who of Canadian Women, 1999–2000 . University of Toronto Press, 1999, p. 452.

Documentary film

  • Agnès Varda : Ydessa, les ours et etc. Documentation (video, 44 ​​min.), France 2004.

Web links

Commons : Ydessa Hendeles  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kunsthalle Wien : Ydessa Hendeles. Death to Pigs , biographical artist profile in the portal kunsthallewien.at , accessed on September 16, 2019
  2. ↑ Sharon Doyle Driedger: A passion for art at the cutting edge . In: Maclean’s , September 9, 1996 edition
  3. ↑ Georg Imdahl : Aversion and Aggression . Article from May 1, 2018 in the faz .net portal , accessed on September 17, 2019
  4. ↑ Awarding of an honorary doctorate to Ydessa Hendeles , website of October 18, 2017 in the portal uni-marburg.de ( Philipps University of Marburg ), accessed on September 16, 2019
  5. ↑ John Bentley Mays: Bears . In: Canadian Art . Fall 2002, pp. 92–97 ( PDF )
  6. ↑ Manohla Dargis : The Innocence Is Deceptive in This Teddy Bear World . Reviewed on February 16, 2005 in the nytimes .com portal , accessed on September 18, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Hendeles, Ydessa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian artist, art therapist, art collector, gallery owner, curator and patron
DATE OF BIRTH December 27, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Marburg , Hesse