Contemporary Calgary
701 11 St SW T2P 2C4
403.770.1350
contemporarycalgary.com

Events
Sunday: Event to be confirmed!
Closed
Noon – 5 pm
The Exhibition
Collider
May 30, 2019 – January 5, 2020
Taking a cue from Particle Accelerators, Collider serves as a catalyst for collaborative experimentation and discovery through a collision of ideas and actions. This inaugural project employs a peer nomination process to invite 30 local artists to make Contemporary Calgary and the former Centennial Planetarium their studio and community hub. Visitors to Collider will encounter a dynamic and vibrant space of creativity and collaboration in an open studio, long term residency environment that responds to our City’s appetite for inclusion and diversity while showcasing the extraordinary talent in our own backyard. Generating new work for Contemporary Calgary’s fall exhibition Planetary, residents are asked to consider ideas ranging from galactic exploration and speculative futures to meaningful memories triggered by the historic context of the former Planetarium.
Brutal Visions
May 30, 2019 – January 5, 2020
Providing a rich and engaging context for the recently reawakened Centennial Planetarium, Brutal Visions invites viewers to explore the history, architecture and future ambitions of Contemporary Calgary’s new home. The exhibition will provide an overview of brutalist architecture situating the Jack Long designed Planetarium, winner of a Massey Medal for Architecture, as one of Canada’s superlative examples of the movement. The project continues with a short survey of Canada’s 1967 Centennial building projects celebrating the Planetarium as Calgary’s officially designated contribution. With optimism and space exploration shaping the zeitgeist, the Centennial Planetarium captured the hearts and imaginations of our communities and continues to provoke strong sentiments some 50 years later. It’s only fitting that, today, the building transforms into Contemporary Calgary—a world class art gallery and community hub that continues to inspire and foster new perspectives of the world. With sketches and preliminary models, joined by historic photographs, original posters and artifacts, Brutal Visions revisits a past driven by raw honesty and optimism to serve as the foundation of a promising future.
Clemens Gritl: A Future City from the Past
May 30, 2019 – January 5, 2020
Clemens Gritl’s body of work, A Future City from The Past, is based on a mystifying vision of a radically aggressive urban dystopia — an uncompromising design in the brutalist dogma. Gritl ponders a future where all buildings and structures are homogenic. The differentiations of architectural styles and eras are eliminated and replaced by geometric structures, repetition and absolute materiality. Gigantic “wohnmaschinen” (living machines) encompassed by endless motorway networks, make way for the “Super-Brutalist” megacity.
The thrill of this project lies in exploring the aftermath. It is fascinating to imagine how a prefabricated, futuristic metropolis would age, and what atmosphere an endless manmade landscape, constructed of only concrete and asphalt, would generate. What impact would such a massive concentration of sculptural architecture have on mankind? Could such a city succeed in producing a functional society, or would it automatically plunge into menacing social dysfunction?
Gritl’s work focuses on the interaction between space, dimension, scale, monotony and materiality of urban megastructures and their possible impact on human beings. Since completing his architectural studies in Munich and Rome, Clemens Gritl has been designing artificial 3D computer models, reflecting and exploring urban utopias of the 20th century. Research at the Technical University of Munich on mid-century, large-scale apartment buildings led Gritl to gain a deep fascination for such structures. In contrast to contemporary architecture these projects are based on revolutionary social visions.