CALGARY—Calgary-based artist Ted Knudtson is heartbroken by the theft of his first gallery-ready piece of art.He put in hundreds of hours of “blood, sweat and tears” to make and display the work; then it was stolen by art thieves who planned and orchestrated a major heist at the city’s Gerry Thomas Gallery in the Beltline area on May 20.“Having it stolen broke my heart, and I haven’t fully recovered yet,” he said of his piece, The Courage to Fall, a 75-pound set of wings made of steel and bronze that’s six feet wide and three feet tall.“Thieves have a hundred different motivations, but I think rarely do they think about the hundreds and hundreds of person-hours that went into these works, the emotions,” he said at a media conference called by Calgary police on Wednesday.Knudtson’s piece is one of about 30 to 40 works that police say were stolen, worth more than $500,000 in total.Const. Pavel Adaikin said the Calgary Police Service held off making the May heist public until now because there was a high risk of the collection being destroyed.The gallery sits in the basement of a brown, multi-use building on the 600 block of 11 Ave. S.W. Patrons can access it by first entering a ground-level café; a set of stairs leads viewers from the café down to the gallery.Gallery owner Gerry Thomas and Adaikin both indicated a decent amount of manpower and planning went into the heist.Police said the thieves used a reciprocating saw to cut open locks on the gallery’s main door.“They were here for about six to seven hours,” Adaikin said, declining to comment on the gallery’s alarm system and whether it was working. “They were coming in and out over several hours.”Prior to the theft, Adaikin said police believe one of the thieves was in the gallery and had adjusted a security camera so a specific area wasn’t visible on camera.“(It) was the camera that was p ...
|
