Victor Cicansky, CM SOM (born 1935) is a Canadian sculptor known for his witty narrative ceramics and bronze fruits and vegetables.
[1] A founder of the Regina Clay Movement,[2] Cicansky combined a "wry sense of style" with a postmodern "aesthetic based on place and personal experience".
[2] Inspired by California Funk, his work included brightly painted figurative narratives with subjects – "characters rather than caricatures" – within architectural constructions described as "hard and rough, deliberately etched and maintaining the crude granularity of the reinforced clay.
[4] The eldest son of Mary and Frank Cicansky (Czekanski) of Romanian descent, he grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Garlic Flats, known for its vegetables gardens.
[2] Cicansky then returned to Saskatchewan to teach art education at the University of Regina, and began to explore the imagery of his youth in figurative narrativion.
Described as "non-elitist" and a "celebration of the harvest" by curator Bruce Ferguson,[14] his work reflects his upbringing, love of gardening and opposition to urban "disdain of anything small.
[16] At the time of his solo exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, journalist Nancy Tousley wrote: "These works are about place, but they take a slightly distanced view — their knowing humour is benevolent but satirical, it hovers outside or above the depicted scenario.
"[17] Curator Timothy Long wrote that his fusion of art references with childhood memories, a "riotous marriage of high and low culture"... "results in a wry prairie humour which is uniquely Cicansky's.
"[12] Although representative of an era, for Dunlop Gallery curator Wayne Morgan: "The stories told by the main clay artists during this period — Cicansky, Fafard, Levine, Thauberger and Yuristy — remain true today and are still important.