Eli Bornstein (b.1922) occupies a unique place in the story of modern art in Canada. For over seven decades he has devoted his artistic career to working with abstract three-dimensional works, or Structurist Reliefs, as he has dubbed them. These multicoloured objects extend into the world, their appearances changing with the play of light and shadow and with the onlooker's viewpoint. Simultaneously, Bornstein has always rooted his art in an intense study of natural phenomena.
In
Eli Bornstein: Life & Work
, Roald Nasgaard traces the story of Bornstein's career, from his youth in Milwaukee to his permanent move to Saskatoon in 1950. He explores how the artist became one of the first in Saskatoon's then-conservative cultural circles to engage with abstract art. Readers are taken through Bornstein's passion for the prairie terrain and his journeys to the Canadian Arctic. Out of the latter came a series of grand multiplane reliefs that stand as the most sublime work of the artist's career.
Bornstein was also a prolific writer and an editor whose periodical
The Structurist
was published and distributed internationally from 1960 to 2020. Neither strictly a painter nor a sculptor, Bornstein has a singular career in the history of Canadian art, one noted for its major ambition and distinctive aesthetic achievement.