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Elvis has left the bidding
Costello shows to croon as VAG auction defies market swoon

The all-white décor of the Vancouver Art Gallery auction suggested a wedding set, and as one gallerist exclaimed, it was exhilarating to be among so many wealthy people passionate about art. Sipping pre-dinner champagne, guests included Jost Baaker and wife Marlee Ross. Thanks to gala co-director Claudia Beck (spectacular in brilliant green heels) the auction catalogues were impressive, and in defiance of crashing stock markets, bidding often exceeded suggested prices by thousands of dollars. David Aisenstat, newly appointed chair of the VAG Board, snagged Elvis Costello as the promised secret celebrity, but organizers fretted until three days before the party waiting for confirmation. ... A few weeks later at the VAG, an installation and performance by internationally renowned artist Kai Althoff saw guests crowded into a stuffy top-floor room. Politicians Larry Campbell and Peter Manning and artists Jeff Wall, Angela Grossman and Attila Richard Lukacs watched Althoff in whiteface beat a drum and bob and sway among people doing calisthenics.

For her recent show Roman Holiday at the Bau-Xi Gallery, Val Nelson decided “to let her brush lead.” The result: a visual banquet of impressionistic brushwork, renaissance subject matter and the incongruity of 21st-century scaffolding cropping up in every canvas. Upstairs, Marcus Bowcott’s land- and seascapes, with their flat planes and cool colours, offered a quiet, meditative contrast to Nelson’s lavish works. The portraits of women and children, by Chinese artist Xue Mo at the Diane Farris Gallery, also evoked the renaissance with their distant landscapes and mid-canvas horizons.

More paintings at the Jeffrey Boone Gallery, where Jeff Depner presented a series of colourful geometrics in Reconfigured Grids. ... The VAG exhibition WACK! has spawned other feminist-themed exhibitions including a collection of historical printed material by and about local women artists at Artspeak Gallery. On the opening afternoon, gallery director/curator Melanie O’Brian chatted with Marianne Penner Bancroft, whose own show was on at the Republic Gallery, and her ECAID colleague, Randy Lee Cutler.