Vancouver Biennale: Giants

 Every city needs art and art has to be in the middle of the people.” — OSGEMEOS

The Vancouver Biennale is a two-year-long outdoor public art installation that takes place every two or three years. The first was from 2005 to 2007, the second from 2009 to 2011, and the latest, the third Biennale, began in the spring of 2014 and finishes up this year.

The installations by world-renown artists are scattered across Greater Vancouver. The most impressive piece of this latest Biennale is Giants by the twin Brazilian brothers, Gustavo and Otávio Pandolfo, who call themselves OSGEMEOS. (Os gemeos is Portuguese for “the twins.”)

Giants consists of murals painted on six concrete silos located at Ocean Concrete on Granville Island. (An aside: this concrete factory is the last vestige of False Creek’s industrial past.) The murals alternate between facing the water and facing inland. They are colourful, and they are cheerful, which seems to be a hallmark of the most successful installations of the Biennale. None are intended to be permanent, but sometimes we just can’t bear to let them go. Hopefully this one will be kept on as well.

Oh, and any guesses as to how much paint was used?

A mere 1400 cans.