Exhibitions

Frederick Hagan | Close to Home: Paintings from 1940-1990
May 5 -19, 2018
350 Dundas St. West, Toronto, Upper Gallery
Opening Reception: Saturday May 5^th, 2-4pm

Frederick Hagan’s unique work has for decades responded to and shaped Canadian painting. Born in Toronto and raised in Cabbagetown, Hagan looked to his lived environments as sources for his artistic subjects. This is certainly evident in the collection of work to be exhibited in Close to Home: Paintings from 1940-1990. The works offer intimate glimpses into the artist’s home and studio; masterpieces honouring the humble objects found there.

Immersed in a culture of painting that increasingly privileged abstraction, Hagan was firmly committed to his figurative style with little investment in self-promotion. But the artist’s canvases were nonetheless deeply symbolic, powerful, and energized portraits of humanity that combined Cubist, Mannerist, Expressionist, and even Classical principles of composition while ultimately creating a style all his own, rooted his personal, existential questioning.

In 1967, Hagan was awarded the Canadian Centennial Medal; in 1985, he was commissioned by Canada Post to create the 16 postage stamps, issued 1986-1989; in 1998, he was awarded the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal. His work is presented in prominent public collections including those of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Royal Ontario Museum.

Frederick Hagan passed away on September 6, 2003 at the age of 85. "Close to Home: Paintings from 1940-1990" is being held this May to honour the late artist’s centennial.

View the collection here

Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber | THE EMPIRE, THE CITY
Featured Exhibition, Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival 
May 1-31, 2018
350 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening reception: Saturday, May 5, 2-4pm

Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber’s urban scenes represent the spaces which celebrate modern culture, knowledge and innovation: the mall, the museum, the library and the vacuum showroom. Here, the natural world reclaims itself in an ironic realization of a paradise lost, leaving the monuments of civilization and material culture abandoned. Evidence of human presence may still be visible, but the cause for their absence is left unclear; the narrative remains open-ended.

As self-described ‘non-traditional’ photographers, Nix and Gerber meticulously construct their subject matter by hand, and capture it entirely in-camera, refraining from the use of digital manipulation. They build painstakingly detailed, three-dimensional dioramas, which often measure no more than twenty inches high, and can take up to fifteen months to complete. Nix uses a large-format film camera to render these miniature scenes larger than life, infusing layers of irony and whimsy into the seemingly grandiose scale of her and Gerber’s urban tableaux.

This exhibition has been selected as a featured exhibition for the annual Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. 

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE COLLECTION 

Andre Petterson | brand
April 14 – 28, 2018
3045 Granville St, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 14, 2:00 - 4:00pm

Advertising logos pepper tapestries of billboards, street signage and bus banners across urban landscapes in cities and rural villages all over the world. Branding, an essential tool for marketing and identity construction in late capitalism, serves as a mode of communication rife with meaning about access, possession, and consumption. In brand, Vancouver-based artist Andre Petterson explores themes of globalization and cultural homogenization through the dissemination of visual ephemera in marketing campaigns of large western corporations such as Disney, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks.

Best known for his work blending painting and photography, Andre Petterson exposes the breakdown of traditional distinctions between high and low, real and fake, old and new, urban and rural through cutting, collaging and painting. brand destabilizes the significance of recognizable cultural signifiers as they are re-contextualized and re-configured in different contexts; sometimes reinforcing wealth or status, other times receding to obscurity to the point of ironic absurdity.

brand is presented as part of the 2018 Capture Photography Festival.

VIEW COLLECTION

Barbara Cole |  Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival 
April 17-May 31, 2018
First Canadian Place Gallery, 100 King Street West, Toronto 
Artist reception: Thursday, May 10, 5-7pm, with a collector’s preview at 4:30 pm

Bau-Xi Photo is proud to present a retrospective of photographer Barbara Cole’s work at First Canadian Place Gallery, as part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. The exhibition features works from Cole’s four most recent series; Duplicity, Miroir d’eau/Meditations, Falling Through Time and Figure Painting. Join us at FCP Gallery, 100 King Street West, on Thursday, May 10 from 5-7pm for the opening reception, and to hear the artist discuss her work. Please RSVP at photo@bau-xi.com to attend the collector’s preview at 4:30 pm.

Barbara Cole is an award-winning Canadian artist who is known for her distinct underwater photography. Cole’s artwork is extensively collected by both public and private institutions and has been exhibited worldwide in venues such as the Canadian embassies in Washington, D.C. and Tokyo, Japan. 

Click here to view Barbara Cole's work 

Pat O’Hara | Serpentine
March 24 - April 10
3045 Granville St, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 24, 2-4PM, Artist in Attendance

Pat O’Hara’s latest suite of acrylic paintings draws on a variety of techniques which overlap sinuous swirls and curvilinear forms. A departure from the bright and saturated palette of her previous body of work Linearity, O’Hara’s use of dense and earthy colours evokes landscape imagery and meditates on life and death.

Since her break away from representational subject matter in 2013, repetitive line and mark-making have become O’Hara’s signature oeuvre. In Serpentine, the artist eschews her emphasis on even line and experiments with modulated brushstrokes to investigate the psychological tension revealed in broken line and ambiguous colour relationships. Each painting is rich with atmospheric effect. The eye dances between bundled marks of opaque paint which meander in ever-searching oblivion, fragmented and incomplete, evolving into transformative and hopeful utopias.

VIEW THE COLLECTION

350 Dundas St West, Toronto
March 24 to April 7, 2018

Bau-Xi Photo is thrilled to present a group exhibition, showcasing work by David Leventi, Jill Greenberg, David Burdeny and Barbara Cole. 

Click here to view the photography collection 

HUGH MACKENZIE | The 90th Year
March 3-17, 2018
340 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday March 3, 2:00 - 4:00pm

Bau-Xi Toronto is pleased to present a collection of work from the studio of Hugh Mackenzie. Since the 1950s, Mackenzie has appealed to the personal: love and pain are counterweights in compositions that ruminate on life in all its sadness and respite.

The exhibition marks the artist’s 90^th year of life—an accomplishment which serves as a testament to the artist’s enduring creative skill. Alongside new palette knife paintings and highly detailed lithographs are rare egg tempera paintings from the 1970s, which showcase Mackenzie’s impressive range and professional foundation in technical painting and drawing. Paintings are meditations on intimate moments and range from realism to the provokingly abstract: a sleeping nude, a receding city skyline, flattened architectural vignettes, and stark figure studies together construct a quiet—but deeply emotional—portrait of an artistic life made up of fleeting visions.

Hugh Mackenzie has exhibited extensively across the country, and is the subject of numerous catalogues and publications and is represented in such major collections as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Carleton University Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art.  Among his accomplishments, he was notably the original draughtsman and illustrator assigned to design of the Avro Arrow. In 2017, Mackenzie was granted the Distinguished Educator Award from OCAD University, in appreciation of his lasting legacy as an instructor at OCA in the 1960s. Hugh Mackenzie lives and paints in Toronto.