THIERRY DELVA

For much of his career as a sculptor, Thierry Delva has produced work that is one-to-one in scale whether these are modified commercial refrigerators or mundane domestic objects such as styrofoam coolers that he has precisely rendered in polished white marble. Through out this, Delva has been concerned with the persistent questions of modernism; content, form, self-referentiality, the rigors of practice and material. While earlier work involved stone cutting and carving techniques adapted from traditional masonry practices (Delva is a master stone mason), his mid career work has involved casting the containers that bring North Americans everything from their food to entertainment to status; boxes, can, jars and jugs that held beer, roses, cell phones, flashlights and VCR’s cast in plaster, iron or bronze.

His most recent work, Drawing from the Heart: Reproductions reflects another form of one-to-one relationship: EKG readings of Delva’s heart’s activity as he is engaged in periods of ‘deep looking’ at images of various subject matters.

Thierry Delva was born in Deinze, Belgium, in 1955 and immigrated to Canada in 1977. He completed BFA (1985) and MFA (1993) degrees from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax where he currently teaches sculpture.

Delva has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. Venues include The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), Museum London (London, Ontario), The Art Gallery of Windsor (Windsor, Ontario), RAW (Hartford, Connecticut), Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto, Ontario), and The Bass Museum of Art (Miami Beach, Florida), among others. His work is in public collections such as the National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the Nova Scotia Art Bank. Delva is the recipient of several grants from the Canada Council of the Arts and Nova Scotia Arts.