In 1967, General Idea was founded in Toronto by AA Bronson (b. 1946), Felix Partz (1945-1994), and Jorge Zontal (1944-1994). Over 25 years, they made a significant contribution to postmodern and conceptual art in Canada and beyond.
"GI" worked across various media including photography, sculpture, painting, mail art, video, installations, multiples, and performance.
Consumerism was a theme that made regular appearances throughout their oeuvre. GI regularly confronted the reality that art had traditionally been a luxury item, a social flex, and a commodity.
Between 1986-1988, General Idea produced the Copyright series, a body of works painted on canvas, denim, and cloth, and executed with bleach, leather strips, or gold leaf. This work, a paradigm of the series, features an enlarged Copyright symbol that encompasses the composition. The stretched denim is beached with a tie die effect that ripples around the symbol.
These paintings appropriated the international symbol of legal ownership and turned it into an oversized abstract logo. Was GI mocking or paying homage to artists such as Kenneth Noland or Claude Tousignant? Regardless these paintings became the ideal version of abstraction in the post-modern era.
General Idea's works frequently have art, consumerism, and iconography confront each other in jarring but playful ways. AA Bronson once explained, “General Idea was at once complicit in and critical of the mechanisms and strategies that join art and commerce, a sort of mole in the art world.”
Condition: very good
