A celebration of the life and work of artist Mansaram

Panchal Mansaram’s move to Canada in 1966 was based on two assumptions: That Canadians had a lot of money and would therefore buy more art and that he would find work at Expo 67 being held in Montreal.

“I was wrong on both counts,” he says with a soft chuckle. “Canadians weren’t rushing to buy art and in Montreal, I was told that I was a couple of years too late as all the work had already been commissioned.”

Not someone who allows circumstances to get the upper hand, he moved to Toronto with his wife Tarunika and looked around for work.

He went on to earn fame as a Canadian artist and thirty years after his last exhibition at the Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB), the Gallery is celebrating the life and work of P. Mansaram, Burlington’s senior media artist, educator, and maverick.

Curated by Indu Vashist and Toleen Touq of the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), The Medium is the Medium is the Medium thinks through the artist’s decades-long practice of repetition. For P. Mansaram, repetition is art practice, repetition is meditation, repetition is spirituality, repetition is falling in love, and as he says, repetition is a way to finding god. Strategically using recurrence and reproduction through a variety of media including drawing, painting, collage, text, sculpture, xerox, silkscreen printmaking, and film, P. Mansaram’s work invokes unending feelings of travel: through time, dimension and territory.

Exhibition guided tours are available upon request. Please contact AGB Senior Curator, Suzanne Carte, via email at suzanne@agb.life to arrange a tour.