Ydessa Hendeles

The Ydessa Gallery

In 1980, Hendeles established The Ydessa Gallery in Toronto, a commercial space devoted to the presentation of Canadian contemporary art. The gallery represented such artists as Kim Adams, Shelagh Alexander, Tony Brown, FASTWÜRMS, Andreas Gehr, Rodney Graham, Noel Harding, Nancy Johnson, Ken Lum, Liz Magor, John Massey, John McEwen, Peter Hill, Sandra Meigs, Jana Sterbak, Jeff Wall and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Hendeles closed The Ydessa Gallery in 1988.

Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation

In October 1987, Hendeles announced that she would establish a non-profit art foundation and that she purchased a two-storey building located at 778 King Street West in downtown Toronto as the future site of the foundation’s exhibition programme. In November 1988, after extensive renovations, the 14,000-square-foot former uniforms factory became home of the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation: Canada’s first privately supported contemporary-art exhibition space.

Hendeles launched her exhibition programme in December 1987 with Katharina Fritsch: Madonna of Lourdes, presented at the Toronto Eaton Centre (the city’s most popular shopping mall). For the week leading up to Christmas, Hendeles installed Fritsch’s sculpture of a small Madonna icon statue, enlarged to adult-size and rendered in bright yellow-painted Duroplast, in the middle of the pedestrian mall at the peak of its busiest shopping season. Hendeles positioned the sculpture so that it could be viewed against the background of the Church of the Holy Trinity, an historic Anglican Church around which the western side of the Toronto Eaton Centre was built.

The Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation was formally established in 1988 with a mandate to provide a programme of contemporary-art exhibitions from a developing collection. In November 1988, the gallery space opened with the inaugural show Christian Boltanski, a five-gallery exhibition of the French artist's work, including the site-specific commission Canada (1988).

In the book Private Spaces for Contemporary Art (2010), Peter Doroshenko described the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation as functioning “more like an intellectual visual arts laboratory than an art centre or private collection space,” and declared the foundation’s gallery “one of the most important contemporary spaces in North America.”

Over a span of 25 years Hendeles curated more than 30 exhibitions at the Toronto space. Though the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation closed its gallery doors in 2012, it continues to function as a non-profit organization but now, as Hendeles stated, "without walls."

Exhibitions

In 2003, Hendeles guest-curated Partners, a 16-gallery exhibition for the Haus der Kunst, Munich, at the invitation of then-incoming director Chris Dercon and the new chief curator, Thomas Weski. For Partners Hendeles combined work by Diane Arbus, Maurizio Cattelan, James Coleman, Hanne Darboven, Walker Evans, Luciano Fabro, On Kawara, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Giulio Paolini, Jeff Wall and Lawrence Weiner, together with series of photojournalistic images, anonymous vernacular photographs and antique vernacular objects. This exhibition also included Hendeles's own work Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002, a large-scale installation built around an archive of family-album photographs, each including the image of a teddy bear (see external link below).

Partners (The Teddy Bear Project) was first shown in the group exhibition sameDIFFERENCE at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation in Toronto (2002). It was expanded as a two-gallery installation for Partners at Munich’s Haus der Kunst (2003), then remounted in Noah’s Ark by the National Gallery of Canada (2004) and 10,000 Lives, the 2010 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea. It was exhibited again in 2016 at New York’s New Museum in The Keeper, a group show curated by Massimiliano Gioni.

Other exhibitions include Marburg! The Early Bird! at the Marburger Kunstverein (de), Germany (2010); The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project) with Roni Horn at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2011); and THE BIRD THAT MADE THE BREEZE TO BLOW at Galerie Johann König, Berlin (2012). Her work From her wooden sleep... (2013) was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, UK in 2015, curated by Philip Larratt-Smith (see external link below). In 2016, Hendeles expanded and augmented From her wooden sleep… specifically for the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, curated by Suzanne Landau.

Hendeles is represented by Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto. Her first exhibition for the gallery, Death to Pigs was presented in the fall of 2016. An exhibition catalogue for Death to Pigs is slated for publication in 2017.

In June 2017, Hendeles's exhibition, The Milliner's Daughter opened at Toronto's The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, curated by Gaëtane Verna. This is the first major survey of Hendeles's work in a public museum.

Awards and recognition

Hendeles was inducted as a Member into the Order of Canada in 2004 and the Order of Ontario in 1998. She received a Governor General's Award in 2002 for “Outstanding Contribution in the Visual and Media Arts.” She was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002 and a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.

Hendeles received an honorary doctorate from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1996 and the University of Toronto in 2000. She was named an Honorary Fellow of the Ontario College of Art and Design (now OCAD University) in 1998 and received an “Award of Distinction” from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Concordia University, Montreal in 2009.

Hendeles received the 2004 “Founders Achievement Award,” presented by the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts and the 2003 “Award of Distinction,” from the Toronto International Art Fair (now Art Toronto).

The Ontario Association of Art Galleries (OAAG) has honoured Hendeles's exhibitions with multiple awards including “Exhibition of the Year” for Marburg! The Early Bird! in 2011 and sameDIFFERENCE (which also received an OAAG award for “Best Exhibition Installation and Design”) in 2003 and “Special Recognition Award” for the exhibitions Dead! Dead! Dead! in 2008 and Predators & Prey in 2007. Hendeles also received the first “Award for Outstanding Achievement” from OAAG in 1998.

In 2003, The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper chose Hendeles as its “Artist of the Year.”

Publications

Partners, edited by Chris Dercon and Thomas Weski (Haus der Kunst, Munich and Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne), 2003 (ISBN 3-88375-755-1)

From her wooden sleep... (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern), 2016 (ISBN 978-3-7757-4103-3)