Favro's work deals with the nature of perception, reality and art itself, as well as with the insistent presence of the machine environment. He is an important figure among a significant generation of artists –
Jack Chambers,
Greg Curnoe, and
Ron Martin among them – who became active in that city in the early 1960s and drew national attention as the London Regional School of artists. He is also well known as a founding member of the
Nihilist Spasm Band. As a teenager he moved to London where, from 1958 to 1962, he studied at
H.B. Beal Technical and Commercial School, after which he enrolled in the specialized art classes offered at Beal (at the time, one of the few training schools for artists in Canada). Early on, he showed an interest in machines of all kinds, an interest that was encouraged by an uncle who was a tinkerer and
inventor. Favro began his career painting brightly coloured works on masonite. A Canada Council Arts Bursary in 1970 allowed him to devote himself to quit painting to pursue his other interests – guitars, machines, airplanes, and experiments with film images and inventions. That year he developed his first successful "projected reconstruction", in which images on a slide are projected onto their wooden, white, life-sized counterparts, giving them colour, detail and identity. The formative years of Favro's practice in the 1960s were marked by a growing desire to collapse the boundaries between art and life. In contrast to
Andy Warhol's Factory led the American
Pop Art movement of the period, Favro resisted the mass-produced image and object. He was determined instead to build, even replicate, his own 'things' from the materials at hand, repurposing the
readymade and reasserting the relationship between object and maker. painted wood, film projection 213.3 x 365.7 x 914.4 cm Art Gallery of Ontario -->Significant works over the course of his eclectic career include "projected paintings" such as
Country Road (1971–1972),
Synthetic Lake (1972–1973) and
Van Gogh’s Room (1973–1974), reconstructions such as
Sunlight on Table and Floor (1990) and
Hydro Pole (1995–1996), and a series of drawings and mechanically-improvised constructions of flying machines, their parts and hand tools, that include
Sabre Jet, 55% Size (1979–1983) and
Air Compressor and Turbine (1996–1997). In 1997, he received the
Gershon Iskowitz Award for career achievement. He is a 2007 recipient of the
Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. He is a member of the
Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Favro is represented by the Christopher Cutts Gallery in
Toronto. ==References==