Robert Wiens

Robert Wiens (born 1953 in Leamington, Ontario) is a Canadian visual artist.

[1] He attended the New School of Art from 1973 to 1974, and had his first solo exhibition at Mercer Union in Toronto in 1980.

Wiens’ early work consisted of large-scale sculptures and installations, depicting fragments of heroic monuments.

[6] He used sculpture and installation to explore social issues and ideas of language and representation.

[8] Wiens photographs the trees and then painstakingly reproduces their texture, colour and scale.

[9] Wiens’ tree portraits also function as memorials to, or remnants of the destruction of Canadian forests.

As John Armstong writes in C Magazine, "Wiens creates, in his pinpoint framing and cool description, a chilly distance between the living trees and what we see in the gallery: he gestures both romance and the deadpan optics of a ledger.