Ian Wallace
Nationality: British-born, Canadian
Born: 1943-09-25, Shoreham, England

Ian Wallace began to make art in 1965, and received his MA in art history from the University of British Columbia in 1968. Wallace taught at UBC from 1967 to 1970, and at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design from 1972 to his retirement in 1998. His prestigious exhibition career includes Canadian group and solo exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, David Bellman Gallery and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, and international group and solo exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. He continues to be an influential artist, teacher and writer.

Since the early 1970s, Wallace has repeatedly paired photography with monochrome painting, thereby uniting two apparently antithetical forms of the early 1970s: the polemical documentary practice of photographers such as Victor Burgin, Hans Haacke and Alan Sekula, and the reductivist, monochrome painting of artists like Robert Ryman, Brice Marden, and the young Gerhard Richter. Wallace's works undercut the "truth" of documentary film and photography by highlighting tensions between the particularity of the documentary subject and the universality of the monochrome. He does this through a formal juxtaposition of the two as a kind of constructivist photomontage. Traditionally, photography and painting are thought to offer different kinds of aesthetic experiences to viewers. Wallace's works complicate this theoretical division by presenting painting and photography side by side, thereby creating hybrid works which expose the differences and break down the barriers placed between the two. Over the years of his practice, Wallace has worked with this idea of hybridity, juxtaposing panels of monochrome painting with photographic panels which have explored the principal themes of the studio, the museum and the street.