Exhibitions

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present a dynamic new body of work by Toronto-based painter, Janna Watson. In a solo exhibition titled Falling Forward, Watson reasserts and expands on her distinctive abstraction and emphatic colour that propelled her into national and global recognition. 
 
"Life unfolds towards the unknown, as intangible forced propel us into the future at an unprecedented rate."

Falling Forward was completed in 2020, before "shit hit the fan", and yet still feels appropriate. 

This new body of work by Canadian painter, Janna Watson, articulates the subconscious energy afoot, that draws awareness to an invisible creator and shares in this moment, making visible the things that create movement in life. 
 
Invisible forces have always directed us, and in more ways than we realize: wind steers us, gravity grounds us, friction moves us forward, currents can pull us under and now a virus has taken us to our inner spaces. 
 
Inward is a familiar landing place for Watson, where she finds the force to transform objects and colours, in order to reflect on new futures. 
 
“The ghostly, silent virus is pulling the world inside out,” she explains. “The inevitable sublime that is creating, and re-creating life and time, moment by moment, cannot be stopped. 

"Things just can't help but become themselves."

Falling Forward will be released at Bau-Xi Gallery Toronto in June 2020. Please contact us at 416-977-0600 and toronto@bau-xi.com for enquires and acquisitions. 

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AWAKENINGS | Group Exhibition
May 9 - 23, 2020
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver

In the midst of these difficult times, artists continue to create inspired works in the solitude of their studios.

Bursts of Spring-like colour in Nicole Katsuras’ and Eric Louie’s new paintings are contrasted with the more sombre notes of warning underlying Andre Petterson’s new mixed media works.

The bold and intricate geometric forms in Bonifacho’s oil and acrylic paintings are a foil for the delicate nuanced watercolour works on paper by Vicky Christou.

New works by gallery artists as they arrive will continue to be exhibited in the gallery and online on the New Arrivals page.

Please contact Bau-Xi Vancouver at 604-733-7011 or info@bau-xi.com for additional images or to schedule a private viewing appointment at the gallery.

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Erin Armstrong | Focus Exhibition
May 1-31, 2020
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto

This May, we are excited to present a new collection of work by Toronto painter, Erin Armstrong. In her signature style, Armstrong examines the human condition and the juxtaposition of beauty, joy, anxieties and uncertainty of living in the modern age. The collection features new acrylic on canvas paintings, as well as seven of the artist’s sought-after oil pastel drawings. 

Erin has created work for numerous well-known clients such as Nike, Anthropologie, General Public Art, and The Drake hotel. Her work has also been featured in Nylon Magazine, House and Home Magazine, Domino, ShopBop, Cultured Mag, Yahoo! News and Create! Mag, among others.

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Michael Kenna | Japan
May 1-31, 2020
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto

This May, Bau-Xi Photo presents Japan, a suite of photographic works by acclaimed British photographer, Michael Kenna. By using regional atmospheric elements–such as mist, fog, rain, and snow–and long exposures, Kenna simplifies the landscape into its most basic form. These images are akin to a haiku, capturing the natural juxtapositions of the landscape with his minimalist approach. Kenna has a way of bringing a calm centeredness to these moments of time in nature. He becomes a portrait photographer, capturing the intimacy between himself and the landscape.

Over the course of his career, Michael Kenna (b. 1953. Widnes, Lancashire, England) has become a prominent figure in contemporary photography, leaving his mark in the minimalist movement since the late 1970s. He has mounted over four-hundred and fifty solo exhibitions and has work included in more than a hundred permanent collections. These include but are not limited to: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo; The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; and The Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

Michael’s signature style is attributed to his long-time exposures – mainly taken at dawn or in the dark hours of the night – which capture the interactions between the natural landscape and human-made structures. His intimate silver-gelatin prints are still hand-made, reflect a sense of refinement, his appreciation of photographic history, and have become a trademark of his artistic approach. He currently resides in Seattle, WA.

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Left: Two Winter Stocks, Biei, Hokkaido
Right: Snow on Pebbles, Toya Lake, Hokkaido

Left: Sand Mounds, Kamigamojinja, Kyoto
Right: Torii Gate, Study 3, Shosanbetsu, Hokkaido

Left: Clouds, Fence and Snow, Nakafurano, Hokkaido
Right: Temple Pond, Sanboh-in, Koyasan

Michelle Nguyen | Predation
April 16-30, 2020
340 Dundas Street W., Toronto

This April, Bau-Xi Gallery is excited to present Michelle Nguyen's Predation. Nguyen expands upon her inspiration for the exhibition in the artist statement below: 

 "This particular body of work explores the challenges of hybrid identity and cultural dysphoria through the utilization of representational binaries such as living and dead, inanimate and organic, beast and human, meat and animal, male and female, dark and light, wild and domestic, and predator and prey. These cacophonic tableaus blend the narratives of magic realist literature and Greco-Roman mythology while serving as the setting for a colourful cast of vaguely humanoid creatures in various stages of metamorphosis. The enigmatic nature of these fabricated worlds allows these hybrid characters to occupy multitude of dichotomies at once. (Is this a woman transforming into a swan, a swan transforming into a woman, or something different altogether?) Predation questions false ideas of purity and what it means to occupy identities that exist in limbo."

- Michelle Nguyen 

Born in Toronto, Nguyen currently lives and works in Vancouver. She studied Environmental Design and received her undergraduate degree from the University of British Columbia in 2016.

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Janna Watson | Dragging A Thought Over
February 8 - 22, 2020
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 8, 2-4 pm, Artist in Attendance

Toronto-based abstract painter Janna Watson's latest body of work, featured in her upcoming exhibition Dragging A Thought Over explores what the artist describes as her struggle to "drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of human sense." 

This approach has engendered a highly articulate physicality in Watson's mixed media practice, one readily apparent in the surety of the artist's hand and the dynamism of her ever-broader strokes, marks of the indisputable maturation of a singular talent.

Watson's emotionally charged process echo the confluence of materials at play on the picture surface, taking shape in her complex arrangements of eloquent gestures, which urgently move towards a dramatic visual resolution.

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Cori Creed | Narrative
January 18 - February 1, 2020
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Closing Reception: Thursday, January 30th, 6-8 pm, Artist in Attendance

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present Narrative, West Vancouver painter Cori Creed's most recent collection of works.

A continuation of the artists 20-year exploration of visual storytelling, Narrative marks Creed’s returns to the fundamental drivers of her practice: an exploration of the physical nature of painting and the varied properties of the oil medium.

Engaging with the spatial history of the west coast landscape and its vernacular image, as well as with her own lived experience, Creed depicts the panoramic vistas and natural grandeur with sweeping movements, gestural marks and expressive brushstrokes — disrupting the illusory depths of her canvasses with reminders of process, masterfully shifting the viewer between abstraction and representation, depth and surface.
 

Eric Louie | Emergence
January 11 - 25, 2020
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 11th, 4-5 pm, Artist in Attendance

Vancouver-based painter Eric Louie’s solo exhibition Emergence, at Bau-Xi Toronto, focuses on his ongoing exploration of the interplay of forms in states of transition.

The artist’s distinct future-forward aesthetic and formalist sensibility informs the richly layered virtual worlds of his paintings—rife with colourful shapes, shaded with brightly-hued gradients and accented with chrome-like effects to reinforce a palpable materiality. Louie's forms are at once static and in perpetual motion, synthetic-looking yet singularly organic, imbuing the flatness of the two-dimensional surface with emphatic dimensionality.

These precariously balanced assemblages are charged with dynamic tension and visual potential — evidence of the artist's deft hand as he skillfully manipulates the quality of light and spatial depth within his canvasses to enthralling effect. Ever-present semblances of the familiar, figments of still-lifes, traces of figures and approximations of landscapes emerge from Louie’s evocative compositions as they resist interpretation and beckon the viewer towards abstraction.

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