Gerald Gladstone - Biography

Biography

Gladstone was a member of the group of artists exhibited by Toronto gallery owner Av Isaacs in the 1950s. The group included artists such as Michael Snow, Gordon Rayner, Graham Coughtry, and Tony Urquhart. In 1959, he received his first Canada Council of the Arts grant, relocated to London, England. He studied at the Royal College of Art where he met and befriended the British sculptor Henry Moore. As a result of Moore's influence, Gladstone began a long period of experimentation with figurative sculpture.

In 1967, Gladstone received three commissions for Montreal's Expo 67, but several years later he was struggling to find work. There was an exhibition of his mid- to late-career plastic cube sculptures and his Downtown Nudes Series - a collection of oils on canvas - at the opening exhibition of Toronto's St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, and in 1973 he produced the Electric Figure Series, another collection of oils on canvas. Among his late-career commissions were the Three Graces, a fountain and bronze sculpture for the Ontario government buildings, Female Landscape, a fountain and bronze sculpture at Montreal's Place Ville Marie, Optical Galaxy Sculpture, a fountain and sculpture in Belconnen, Australia, and a fountain and precast concrete sculpture for a Martin Luther King memorial in California.