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REAL PAINT: REALISM AT BAU-XI TORONTO THIS JULY

Left: William Lazos, Bubble Blower, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 inches
Right: Chris Temple, One Way, oil on canvas, 60 x 45 inches

This July, Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto will be exhibiting artwork that celebrates contemporary realism. Three gallery artists will be exhibiting new work in a variety of media, sizes and formats – each interpreting this theme in varied ways. Artists included will demonstrate not just technical skill with, but also the unique ways in which paint contributes to figuration.

Shaun Downey's realist style masterfully bridges traditional portraiture and the contemporary. Jenna Opsahl of Jungle Magazine (London, UK) states: "His scenes are mysterious and unknowable - and yet they feel familiar; as if we ourselves, have been here before." This exhibition closely follows Downey’s inclusion in the public installation Keeping It Real, on at Station Gallery, Whitby, this June and July.

William Lazos' painted surfaces are technically precise and smoothly rendered, using a combination of meticulous airbrush and paintbrush techniques to capture subtle plays of light and complex textural surfaces. His subjects - carnival scenes and other contemporary cultural objects - call on all the senses in their striking detail. Lazos' paintings combine haze and sharp focus, document and memory, hyper-realism and childlike wonder to mesmerizing effect.

Chris Temple has been capturing the complexity and sublimity of Canada's urban environments for over 30 years. His technically precise paintings render the cityscape as something both strong and delicate, familiar yet mysterious, and always reverant of contemporary landscape as an endless source of visual interest. Chris Temple has exhibited extensively across Canada, and is featured in prominent collections and institutions.

CLICK ARTIST NAMES ABOVE TO PREVIEW ARTWORK FOR THIS EXHIBITION

SEND US PHOTOS OF YOUR BLANK WALLS

As part of our art consultation service, we often Photoshop artwork into pictures of your space. We hope this helps clients envision how the artwork will look in their home. The above example digitally shows how a vertical versus horizontal Michael Wolf photo will appear in this space.

If you have an empty wall, feel free to email us an image, along with your favourite artwork or artists from our site, and we will return a mocked-up image of your space.

SHAUN DOWNEY IN PUBLIC EXHIBITION, AND JUNGLE MAGAZINE

Toronto artist Shaun Downey currently has 4 paintings on view at Station Gallery, a public gallery in Whitby Ontario. 'Keeping it Real' runs June 2 - July 10.

Following this exhibition, these stunning paintings travel to Bau-Xi Toronto for inclusion in a photorealism show July 16 - 30, 2016.

Click to view available Shaun Downey artwork on our website: Most pieces are available for acquisition now, and delivery following July 30, 2016.

Downey is featured in the current issue of Jungle (London, UK) in a large spread featuring many of his images.

“Shaun Downey’s paintings beg for a second look, for a pause. His large, photo-realistic portraits are all at once soft, dramatic, and intimate. His scenes are mysterious and unknowable – and yet they feel familiar; as if we ourselves, have been here before.” Jenna Opsahl for Jungle 01.

Barbara Cole Falling Through Time: 20 years in the making

Cole’s project began 20 years ago, when, while traveling, the artist became enamored with the incomparable gardens of England. She was inspired by their romantic ambiance: whimsical lattices, wiry brambles, and lush roses, all overseen by classically inspired statues, impossibly weightless despite their stone medium. Capturing these whimsical spaces with her Polaroid SX-70 film, and later manipulating the malleable photographic surface to painterly effect, Cole’s documentation resulted in a series truly romantic in both history and conception. Still, Cole felt that the project was somehow incomplete; her English garden series was stored away, and soon forgotten.

Falling Through Time is a resurfacing—of not just time and place, but Cole too, who collaborates with a past self. An incomplete project comes full circle as the English garden series becomes background to the artist’s captivating underwater portraits.

The result is a visual study of time in which personal and mythical histories—refracted through the water surface—layer to create dynamic, ethereal scenes with an editorial edge. “These women do not exist in a moment in time,” says Cole, but rather alongside it, as extra-temporal travelers who float between history’s layers with confidence and mystery.

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday June 11, 2-4 pm, Artist in attendance

VIEW THE COLLECTION

VIEW THE MAKING OF THIS SERIES (4 MINUTE VIDEO)

Bobbie Burgers 'Lightly Touch Down'

“The cradle rocks above an abyss and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” – Vladimir Nabokov

Burgers’ latest body of work—Lightly Touch Down—showcases the artist’s commitment to exploring the endless possibilities both in paint’s beauty and its flaws. The floral subject is the vessel by which Burgers’ hand journeys across the canvas, confidently sweeping colour into form, but always reverent of her medium’s expressive qualities. These energizing canvases are portraits, experiments, even narrative studies; it is as though Burgers is able to capture the sublime story of life—in all its strength and fragility—in a single surface. Blooms spring from the void, grow, breathe, rise to crescendo, only to melt off the canvas and dissolve into air with melancholic sweetness. Like Nabokov’s existential declaration, each painting for Burgers lives “to be that crack of light, like fireworks, spending it all at once, living large and rich and beyond its means, holding nothing back.”

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, June 11 from 2 - 4 PM, artist in attendance

Exhibition runs June 11 - 25, 2016 at Bau-Xi Toronto

View the collection

New artist: Kathryn Macnaughton

Bau-Xi is thrilled to announce the latest addition to the gallery stable: Toronto painter Kathryn Macnaughton.

Macnaughton’s abstract paintings are compositional and textural experiments in acrylic. They are also canvases of contradiction: at once contemporary and timeless, flat and sculptural, compiled and uniform, static and unmistakably alive.

Inspired by collage, cut-outs, vintage palettes, and digital illustration, McNaughton’s paintings respond—and inform—the many and converging concerns of the moment: permanence, fragments, history and its ephemera. More than anything, they are playful reminders that the abstract need not be unfamiliar.

A graduate of OCAD, Macnaughton has exhibited in both Canada and abroad since 2010. Recent collaborations include Kit and Ace, Collective Arts Brewery, and Tkees.

View collection here

Steven Nederveen: A Temperate Nature

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present A Temperate Nature, a new series of mixed media paintings by Steven Nederveen.

Fusing both photography and painting, Steven Nederveen develops a magical realism that inspires us to see the natural world with new eyes. Photographs - taken during his treks through the West Coast mountains and seaside parks - emphasize the emotional memory of his travels.

Nederveen's abstract paintings, debuting for the first time, demonstrate an adventurous foray into colour and non-representational art. Deeply personal and yet universal, Nederveen's work suggests that despite the cosmopolitan aspects of Canadian cities, the gestural movement of waves and trees, the height of our vast mountains, and expanse of our prairies speaks to our shared Canadian cultural identity. Transforming the experience of his travel photographs into free-form shapes, drips and textures spilling freely across the panel surface, Nederveen's abstract works present an evolution of his landscape painting, impelling his practice to explore new and challenging places.

Show runs June 11 - 25, 2016 at Bau-Xi Vancouver
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, June 11 from 2 - 4 PM, Artist in attendance
TOUR WITH ARTIST: Saturday June 18 at 1pm, in conjunction with the annual South Granville Art Walk.

View collection here

BARBARA COLE CAPTURES LE PETIT PRINCE

Last summer, Barbara Cole was tasked with capturing the magic of Le Petit Prince in the way she knows best: through her underwater camera lens. To express in an image the enduring charm of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s universally adored novella—a seeming impossibility—was for the Toronto artist a challenge met with energy and enthusiasm. Alongside the celebrated set and costume designer Michael Levine, dancer and choreographer Guillaume Côté, and with principal dancers Tanya Howard and Dylan Tedaldi, Cole plunged underwater to create images characteristic of her signature, ethereal photographic style. Dancers glided, dived, dipped and floated up through their water stage, finding their characters through explorative movement. The shoot quickly became an exercise in letting go--of the predictable physics so essential to dance, of ordinary orientation and perspective, of reality itself as it gave way to the dreamy, gravity-defying world of Le Petit Prince. More information: National Ballet of Canada website

FALLING THROUGH TIME opens June 11th
Just as Le Petit Prince opens to audiences in Toronto this June, Barbara Cole’s exhibition Falling Through Time debuts at Bau-Xi Photo. This exhibition of new work is best described as a resurfacing—Barbara Cole collaborates with a past self by combining a 20 year old Polaroid series of English gardens as a backdrop to the artist’s captivating underwater portraits. Falling Through Time poetically re-arranges past and present by drawing on personal and collective history, myth, and the porous nature of time in the distinct, contemporary style for which the artist has become known.

Please join the artist at an opening reception on Saturday, June 11th from 2-4pm to see Falling Through Time in person. For artwork inquiries, please email info@bau-xiphoto.com. Exhibition runs June 11 - 25, 2016.

Anthony Redpath exhibition opening today in Vancouver

Image: Anthony Redpath, Additive Mix, chromogenic print, 44 x 96 in, edition of 7.

May 26 - June 7, 2015
OPENING RECEPTION: THURSDAY, MAY 26TH, 6-9PM
ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE

The industrial history of coastal British Columbia is the focus of Anthony Redpath's latest photographic series. Framing worn-down or vacant industrial buildings with the intention of capturing only a section of the landscape, Redpath positions his lens at an unnerving distance to disorient the viewer by distilling the subject into a series of different planes. Cropping the image close in post production, RE·FINED verges towards abstraction by removing the directional horizon line in each composition. Enhanced by the complex textures of ribbing, vaulting and rustication in the sugar refinery, pulp mills, and oil refinery that comprise the series, Redpath's attention to detail reveals the effects of time on his subjects as complex, beautiful and indicative of a shift in emphasis within the industrial sectors of coastal British Columbia.

Following the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky and Candida Hofer, Redpath's lens entices the viewer to go beyond the documentary style and examine closely the surface sensuality and rich palette of a decaying landscape. As critic Sky Gooden has observed, "where the Bechers stood back from their industrial subjects, Redpath rushes in."

VIEW THE COLLECTION ONLINE

May 7th Artist Receptions in Toronto

SATURDAY MAY 7th, 2-4PM

BAU-XI TORONTO & BAU-XI PHOTO TORONTO

Join us for opening receptions and meet artists Janna Watson (Toronto) and Jill Greenberg (New York)

Click to visit Facebook event for Janna Watson & RSVP

Click to visit Facebook event for Jill Greenberg & RSVP

Chris Shepherd for Capture

Chris Shepherd

Bau-Xi Vancouver will be presenting 'Construct' a new photographic series by Chris Shepherd as part of the 2016 Capture Photography Festival.

'Construct' opens April 9 in the Upper Floor Gallery.

Capture Photography Festival runs April 1 - 28. Click to view participating photographers and galleries.

Click to RSVP to the Capture Opening Reception.

MEET JILL GREENBERG

Saturday May 7th, 2-4pm

Bau-Xi Photo, 324 Dundas St. West

Jill Greenberg will be at Bau-Xi Photo to discuss her latest series, "Paintings", a feature for Contact Photography Festival.

RSVP to the event on our Facebook page

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