2024 | SEAN WEISGERBER
CURRENTLY IN STOCK
TORONTO
FEB 8 - APR 20, 2024

Installation photos by LF Documentation, individual photos by Toni Hafkenscheid

In a series of new paintings inspired by his move to a studio off of Toronto’s Orfus Road—an area populated by independent shops in strip malls and large outlet stores—Sean Weisgerber looks to his working environment in a storefront space of this 1960s-era shopping district. Taking in the generic retail architectures and aesthetics on his commute to the studio, the work is grounded in the repeating, familiar forms of cinder blocks, full-length mirrors, large display windows, and multi-tenant shopping centre signage. 

His ongoing painting series, Price Per Square Inch, activates a close reading of art and art-making as business, and the artist’s role as culture producer and worker. As in previous suites of these paintings, Weisgerber foregrounds the labour required to produce them, as well as the cost of that labour in a particular moment. At the outset of his project, he calculated the median price per square inch for emerging painters in Canada by culling information from auction catalogues and gallery price lists, to understand how artworks are priced generally. Over time this illuminates an evaluation model in perpetual flux, which Weisgerber continues to make extraordinarily visible through his trademark meticulous, regimented process. 

Looking also to Jo Baer’s monochromatic white paintings from the 1960s, framed with one black and one brightly coloured solid border (reading almost as blank advertising spaces for rent), Weisgerber employs a new strategy for emphasizing the objecthood and visual continuum of his own paintings. New Price Per Square Inch works play with optical illusions of transparency, translucency, and opaqueness as a reflection on “being transparent” in a business sense. As always, the colourways of the sticker components trick the eye, acting on art’s demands for a certain amount of attention, as much as the literal perception of colour relations to the white canvas beneath. 

Consisting of some works that have been upcycled in order to gain a second chance at finding their buyers, this exhibition and its title highlight the relationship of the artist to his labour, and the gallery as a retail setup that uniquely bonds both consumer and producer. Some paintings have been “stickered over” to revise the price per square inch as it has increased over time; another has been expanded with a custom canvas addition to account for its current market value. With his own brand of enduring meditation on the art market at large, Weisgerber persists in drawing our attention to how time, and time spent working, is recorded and remunerated.