Category:painting

TYPOLOGY presents A Riveder le Stelle | Mary Hambleton and Sara MacLean

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TYPOLOGY is thrilled to announce the launch of our guest curating program with A Riveder le Stelle, a two person exhibition. Featuring rarely seen works on paper by the late New York painter Mary Hambleton, and a video installation by Toronto-based Sara MacLean, the exhibition is curated by interdisciplinary artist and independent curator Heather Nicol.

Taking its name from the final line of Dante’s Inferno (1314), A Riveder le Stelle, “to gaze once more upon the stars,” is conceived as a virtual conversation between two artists, separated by time, place, and practice, whose work nevertheless manifests striking formal and conceptual correspondences. Among the many such convergences are a mutual interest in the body, the scientific gaze (particularly as it relates to diagnostic medicine), relationships between the infinitesimal and the celestial, and the sense of wonder such scrutiny engenders.

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Art Toronto 2013 Highlights

Battat Contemporary booth, partial view. Photo by Shani K Parsons.

With so much to do in advance of the project space opening, this year’s visit to the fair was more like a drive-by. However, even the short tour yielded many surprises and much to follow-up on. Featured here are a few favourite booths and interesting artworks from this year’s fair. For artwork information, hover over the image or see credits listed at bottom. For a closer look, click the images to enlarge. For more information on the gallery or artist, links are provided to their respective websites.

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Closing Soon, Opening Soon

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The next couple weeks will see the closing of two great exhibitions in the Toronto area; go see them soon if you can. Land|Slide: Possible Futures (closing October 14) is an ambitious curatorial project which transforms the historical buildings of the Markham Museum into an engaging and interactive contemporary art park. While beautiful by day, we’d recommend an early evening visit to experience some of the more subtle installations’ full effects. Favourites include Deirdre Logue’s multisensory, multichannel video installation, Euphoria’s Hiccups, which activates the walls, floor, and countertops of the Honey House, and Frank Havermans’ Untitled high-tension intervention which parasitizes the Strickler Barn to unsettling effect (both pictured below). Above, Martindale, Myers, and MacKinnon’s “refined and enriched” intervention within the Burkholder carriage house is a thought-provoking commentary on high art consumption.

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Paul Wackers: Almost Somewhere

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This weekend is your last chance to catch Paul Wackers’ gem of a show at Narwhal Projects in the Junction. Titled Almost Somewhere, Wackers’ lovingly crafted paintings suffuse the orderly arrangements of still lifes and interiors with the disruptive energies of emergent or external forces and frameworks, transporting the viewer to a place between Wacker’s real and imagined worlds. Richly detailed textures and colours describing beloved collections of rocks, pots, and plants are juxtaposed with boldly graphic lines, planes, patterns, and shapes both hard-edged and fuzzed out, creating a playful and mysterious tension between the everyday and the extraordinary. Go see it if you can; Almost Somewhere is great place to get lost.

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Joining: Agathe de Bailliencourt

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The month of May belongs to Agathe de Bailliencourt, who will have two solo shows, Eintritt in Toronto and Sheer in New York, plus a site-specific projection onto The New Museum, concurrently on view. Eintritt means “joining” in German (de Bailliencourt is French but currently based in Berlin) and this post joins together images from both of her painting exhibitions as well as selected past projections and site-specific installations. The images are strikingly distinct, yet demonstrate de Bailliencourt’s continuing interest in the expressive mark of the hand (particularly her graffiti-inflected splashes and scrawls), as well as her ongoing engagement with architectural form, space, and especially movement/directionality delineated through the use of decisive gestures, layered textures, and vibrantly contrasting colours.

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After the storm: Denyse Thomasos

The past week has been a whirlwind in many ways, not least because of the devastation Hurricane Sandy wreaked on the East Coast. Here in Toronto, we saw howling winds, a week of rain, and trees down, but nothing like the floods and power outages to our south. As cleanup began over the weekend in New York and New Jersey, we kept tabs on our friends’ progress down there while confronting a wholly unrelated, yet no less saddening tragedy up here — the death of a person we didn’t even know.

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Art Toronto 2012: Highlights from the Fair

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Two Planets: Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai Villagers, 2008,
digital pigment print, Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York

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The Toronto International Art Fair is bigger and better than ever, having eclipsed Art Chicago (which was canceled earlier this year) as Merchandise Mart’s only North American art fair north of the border and not on the coasts. (In case you’re wondering, Merchandise Mart, which also runs The Armory Show, Volta Basel and NY, and Art Platform Los Angeles, was itself recently bought and renamed by Swiss media conglomerate, Informa Plc.)

With over a hundred exhibitors from 23 continents, more than 20,000 visitors expected to attend, and projected sales in excess of $20 million, Art Toronto 2012 set itself apart this year with a rich program of panel discussions and curator’s tours co-developed with the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), the Power Plant, and the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art (MoCCA), a diverse selection of artists and galleries highlighted within the Focus ASIA area and exhibition, the AGO’s ongoing and very visible acquisition program, a capsule exhibition of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition finalists for 2012, and a focus on the fresh perspectives offered by newer galleries in the Next section.

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In the air: Postscript to open and other news

Opening tomorrow at MCA Denver is Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, a wide-ranging exhibition that features the work of over fifty artists and writers including Carl Andre, Fiona Banner, Erica Baum, Christian Bök, Marcel Broodthaers, Ryan Gander, Michelle Gay, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Glenn Ligon, Gareth Long, Michael Maranda, Seth Price, Kay Rosen, Dexter Sinister, Andy Warhol. Presenting works from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, installation, video and works on paper which explore the artistic possibilities of language.

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Corner: John Armstrong and Paul Collins at General Hardware Contemporary

The image arrives as so many do these days, in our News Feed, onscreen. Superimposed upon nondescript boxes, thick lines in contrasting colours cross over each other, canceling the underlying image in a graphically powerful act of negation — it grabs our attention immediately. At first glance, it could be the document of a tricky installation; lines or forms projected or assembled in dimensional space, then photographed from a precise vantage point so as to resolve the fragmented reality into a convincingly flat, yet altogether illusory image. But doubt creeps in upon closer inspection, as the interplay between surface, depth, and detail begins to open the image to all manner of interpretation: are we in fact looking at a photograph of an installation, a painting of a photograph, a photograph of a painting?

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One from the road: Mona Lisa Overdrive

This past week saw Leonardo da Vinci in the news again, this time popping up in the dusty farmhouse of some unbelievably lucky Scots. Poking around our own version of a dusty farmhouse while on vacation this summer, we were not so lucky. However we did manage to dust off another sort of Leonardo-based fascination, buried in a barely cracked edition of Time-Life’s populist Library of Art book series from 1971 (click image to enlarge).

Published in a lavishly illustrated volume titled The World of Leonardo (and authored with help from H.W. Janson of Art History 101 fame), this strangely engaging spread depicts eight early copies of da Vinci’s masterpiece, variously attributed and painted between the early 1500s and the 17th century.

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