Exhibitions

Gallery Artists | Mixed Media 
February 9 – 23, 2019
340 & 350 Dundas Street West, Toronto 

This February, we are excited to present ‘Mixed Media,’ a group exhibition celebrating and highlighting the artistic conversations that occur when painting and photography are featured in the same space. The exhibition will span both of our locations on Dundas Street West, and will include a curated selection of work by Barbara Cole, Janna Watson, Joshua Jensen-Nagle, Kathryn Macnaughton, and Robert Marchessault, amongst many others.

Image details:
Left: Barbara Cole, Underpainting. Right: Kathryn Macnaughton, Fluid. 

Janna Watson | Suspended in Time
February 9 – 23, 2019
3045 Granville Street
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 9, Artist in Attendance

Suspended in Time is a new body of work by acclaimed painter Janna Watson. The exhibition is inspired by the artist’s late grandfather Arthur Bonnet, a seasoned artist who turned away from landscape painting in the 1940s and moved towards abstraction after studying at Pratt Institute in New York as Expressionism was making its way to Canada.

The legacy of Arthur Bonnet is present throughout Suspended in Time. From early painting lessons to exciting trips to the art supply store, Arthur was a pivotal influence on the artist throughout her artistic career. Over the years, Janna has incorporated lighter washes of paint across wood panel, preferring the birch wood surface to canvas for its ability to absorb paint like watercolour paper.  As Arthur taught Janna the fundamentals of painting, he also urged her to develop her own voice and encouraged her to paint wildly. “I love things harmoniously ugly", Arthur would declare. This sentiment now largely informs Janna’s choice of colour, line and stroke as she lays down each bold, intuitive mark, delicately suspended in time and space. The artist explains, “When I feel a painting is nearly complete, I like to use oil stick and ink as the final step to help ground the work. It’s a personal reminder to paint wilder! These scribbles are my exclamation marks that finish each sentence”.

Suspended in Time is Watson’s ode to the late Arthur Bonnet, a suite of paintings created with painterly fervour in honour of the hundredth anniversary of Arthur’s life.

Eric Louie | Chameleon
January 12-26, 2019
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto
Opening reception: Saturday, January 12th, 2019, 2-4 pm. Artist in Attendance

Bau-Xi Gallery Toronto is pleased to present Chameleon, a solo exhibition featuring all new work by oil painter Eric Louie.

Eric Louie is a Vancouver based artist, whose vibrant compositions are being recognized by numerous collectors both public and private.

Louie’s current body of work is the culmination of his experiences as a painter. He describes his work as alluding to landscape, still life, portraiture and how those genres surface in each piece; inventing scenes via many thin layers of luminescent glazes. The delicate, yet dynamic forms that he depicts are central to the ‘virtual worlds’ he creates for the viewer to explore. 

Louie holds a B.F.A from the Alberta College of Art and Design, where he was awarded the prestigious Jason Lang Scholarship. His work is included in numerous private and public collections including CIBC, Encana Energy, NBC Studios, Paramount and MGM Pictures, as well as the City of Calgary.

Louie has shown his work nationally over the past decade in more than 25 exhibitions.

VIEW FULL COLLECTION 

Gallery Feature | George Byrne
January 12-26, 2019
350 Dundas St West, Toronto

Bau-Xi Photo is thrilled to open the year with a group exhibition, featuring the work of Los Angeles-based artist George Byrne. Internationally recognized, Byrne is known for his large-scale photographic works that depict architectural surfaces and urban landscapes as painterly abstractions. He borrows from the clean, vivid clarity of modernist painting, and also references the New Topographics photography movement via a subject matter firmly entrenched in the urban every day.

George Byrne was born in Sydney, Australia in 1976 and graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 2001. He has exhibited internationally in Italy, India, Australia, Los Angeles and New York. In 2010, Byrne relocated to Los Angeles, California where he continues to live and work today.

CLICK HERE TO READ Q&A WITH BYRNE

CLICK HERE TO VIEW COLLECTION 

Chris Shepherd | Incomplete Architectures 
December 1-15, 2018
350 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception + Artist Talk: Saturday, December 1st, 2-4 pm. Artist in Attendance.

"One is continuously encountering construction when walking, cycling, or driving in the city. It seems like new projects are always underway, and the bigger the place, the more prolific the process. Demolition and rebuilding are part of a perpetual cycle that plays out on every street; construction is the life blood of the city, the respiration of urbanity. 

This boundless development is intrinsic to city life; it blends into the day to day and becomes almost invisible. Hundreds of building sites are planted in our subconscious, where they live quietly like the autonomic functions of the body. Like the vital acts of breathing, or the beating of our hearts, construction is an essential part of the life cycle of a city.

Incomplete Architectures uses materials, process, building and development to study ideas of change and impermanence, and the effect they have on us.  It attempts to arrest the endless activity of the city and capture small moments of stillness, sandwiched between the immediate past and the near future. These moments are stunningly beautiful and remarkably affecting in their simplicity. They are traces of what has occurred, and what will be."

Chris Shepherd is a Toronto-based artist known for his use of the photographic medium to document the ever-changing urban landscape. His work has been exhibited across North America, and is included in major corporate collections in Canada. Most recently a number of his works were acquired by the HBC Global Art Collection in New York. 

Cori Creed | Tapestry
November 15-December 1, 2018
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 15, 6-8 pm, Artist in Attendance

In her latest exhibition, painter Cori Creed draws inspiration from the textural quality and patterning found in textile arts. Tapestry deftly interweaves the West Coast landscape tradition with the artist's ongoing engagement with the materiality of the oil medium.

The atmospheric depth and painterly abstraction of these canvases present a constantly shifting warp and weft — lushly layered brushstrokes, threaded through with the artist's distinctive gestural mark-making, emerge from the paint surface and part to reveal swathes of vibrant colour and pictorial space.

In this series, Creed unravels her ever-evolving practice to be repurposed as material, deconstructing source imagery from previous bodies of work as the apparatus for the application of new techniques. Through this process, disparate temporal realities and spatial elements become stitched together and re-fabricated, with new understanding of the subject matter, to evoke the complexity and richness of the natural environment.

VIEW THE COLLECTION

Cara Barer | Opening Reception and Book Launch 
November 10-24, 2018
350 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception and Book Launch: Saturday, November 10, 2-4 pm. Artist in Attendance.

Join us on Saturday, November 10 from 2-4pm for the opening of Cara Barer's latest exhibition, Scrapbooks, and to celebrate the launch of Transformations, the first-ever monograph of her work. The artist will be in attendance to discuss her work, and sign copies of her book. 

About the exhibition: In Scrapbooks, Barer draws on her personal archive as source material, filled with memory. Barer gathers travel photographs, scraps of paper, guestbooks and maps, binds them into book form, and sculpts them into abstraction. Her final photographs speculate about how we might carry on when that archive is gone.  After the Flood is a provocative example that refers to more than the post-hurricane Houston from which it comes. Ambiguously optimistic in its references to disaster, renewal and rebirth, it reiterates Barer’s thesis: that a book is never broken, and memory never lost, only made anew with time and care. Indeed, it is not loss, but accumulation and excess that continues to describe Barer’s future projects, as she remains committed to her practice as a special kind of record keeping. For as long as the book sculpture can take new shape, evolving into more free-form and abstract compositions, so will Barer meticulously sculpt and document. Of the new, hand-bound books waiting to be photographed, Barer aspires to fit in more information than ever before: “I want them to be denser.” From Transformations, 2018.

The viewer can detect the different ephemera, but the images began with my “scrapbooked” thoughts, dreams, visions, and hope.

Click here to view the collection

Click here to purchase Transformations.