Exhibitions

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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SOLO EXHIBITION: Entwine
December 7-21, 2019
340 Dundas Street W., Toronto
Opening Reception & Book Launch: Saturday, December 7, 2019, 2-4 PM, Artist in Attendance 

Bau-Xi Gallery is thrilled to be celebrating 20 years of representing Canadian painter Darlene Cole. To mark this significant occasion, we invite all of Cole’s admirers and collectors to join us in the gallery on Saturday December 7^th from 2-4pm, for a special anniversary book launch and the unveiling of the artist’s newest solo exhibition, Entwine.

Entwine will see beloved past characters and archetypes placed in Cole’s signature interior and nature scenes, presented with an invigorating magnification of emotion.

Darlene Cole's work is extensively collected across Canada and internationally. Notable public collections include: The Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Tom Thomson Art Gallery, the K.F. Preueter Collection of Canadian Art, Royal Bank of Canada, CIBC, OCAD University, Fairmont Hotels (Toronto, Montreal, Banff), and Manulife Financial.

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PURCHASE DARLENE COLE BOOK 

Nicole Katsuras | Painter's Paradise
November 9 - 23, 2019
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 9, 2019, 2-4 PM

Bau-Xi Vancouver is pleased to present Painter's Paradise, Toronto-based artist Nicole Katsuras' first exhibition in Vancouver in over 5 years.

Nicole Katsuras’ approach embraces various past traditions in art history while attempting to create a new formal vocabulary for her creative endeavors. Informed by the nuances of the oil medium and a plethora of visual stimulus, Katsuras’ extruded paint technique operates in tandem with her open-ended source material to compose evocative images that collapse simplistic distinctions of genre to transcend the inherent limits of pictures.

An interest in aesthetic semantics and systems of meaning propels Katsuras' experimentation in mark-making to create an expanding visual language of extrusions, brushstrokes and other varied applications. Developed around the notion of an ‘ideal’ or ‘Utopian’ space where the physical and intangible transcend picture-making, Katsuras' points of departure are manifold. 

Tracing the pedagogical connections of Joan Mitchell and Pia Fries while aligning herself with their distinct stylistic lineage, Katsuras also draws from diverse influences spanning the likes of Monet for his depiction of light, Van Gogh and Bonnard for their technique with colour, and Hofmann's use of spatial illusion. Katsuras also credits her exposure to the unrestrained approaches of Mary Heilmann and Thomas Nozokowski, which allowed the artist license to paint without reservations.

With her high impasto, jewel-like palettes and organic forms, the artist's practice speaks to a persistent underpinning force, one which expands through exuberant gestures outward from the two-dimensional space of her canvasses. Katsuras' gradient, multi-tone surfaces and interacting forms shift focus on the picture plane. Functioning at once as abstract interpretations of the psyche and observational remarks on the harmony of proportion, value and texture, Katsuras' compositions render palpitating spatial tensions with dynamic movements, voluptuous lines and frenetic streaks of colour which layer to build toward a sublime release. 

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Andre Petterson | Balance
October 19 - November 2, 2019
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 19, 2019, 2-4 PM

Balance, Vancouver-based artist Andre Petterson's latest exhibition, is a reflective exploration of the precarious tensions and constant flux at play within the built environment of his surrounding urban landscape, which the artist has observed and bore witness to since his arrival from Saskatoon in 1970.

Central to this series is a body of monolithic found objects: cranes, high-rises, mountains of sulphur, the sculptural qualities of which hearken to the artist’s multidisciplinary practice. This subject matter becomes mediated by Petterson's mixed media methodology, the collage and photo-manipulation elements of which echo similar processes of deconstruction, assemblage and enhancement reiterated in real estate advertising imagery, the physical transformation of the built environment, and in the composite character of the city itself.

In contrast to Petterson's visual metonymies for industry and development,  the negatives spaces of his compositions and the figures that disrupt them enact a forceful allegory of our fraught environs. The presence of these stand-ins reinforce the open-ended nature of Petterson's work, allowing for it to be read in myriad ways. As these figures face away from the viewer, they recall the aesthetic lineage of our recent past and beckon the viewer to bear witness to the precarious balance of the present moment.

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