Detail from Vanitas Still Life (Skulls on a Table); Aelbert Jansz van der Schoor c. 1660
At the Vancouver Art Gallery throughout the summer is a thought-provoking mix of works: 17th century Dutch still life paintings of skulls and flowers, Reece Terris’ stacked rooms organized by decade starting with the 1950′s installed in the gallery’s rotunda, 
and Andreas Gursky’s images of excessive human activity, topped off by the large-scale image of an abstracted Nascar-style race track in Bahrain’s desert, three riffs on an old artistic subject–the vanitas.
Well worth several viewings.
