Pat O'Hara | Gestures

Pat O'Hara | Gestures
September 14-28, 2019
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 14, 2019, 2-4 PM

Gestures explores the progression of established abstract painter Pat O'Hara's lyrical style and her career-spanning experimentation with gesture and mark-making, with a particular focus on the techniques developed over past 5 years. Controlled and restrained or loose and sweeping, O'Hara's application of paint lends graphic form to the definition of "gesture" as visual communication; an intentional movement as a means of expression.

Throughout this body of work, O'Hara's eye for colour marries muted, subtle grounds with bold saturated accents to create unorthodox colour stories, embracing chance and happenstance as it occurs within her varied palette. The artist's compositions arrange fragments of sinuous structures drawn from her most recent Serpentine works with elements of her highly successful Linearity series. O'Hara's profusions of arcing curves, string-painted drips, and repetitive broken-line painting adopt a multi-directional momentum to erupt outwards beyond the confines of pictorial space.

In Gestures, these dual bodies of exploratory movement hint at a deconstructive force within O'Hara's practice. Her instinctual return to the challenge of each gesture becomes reenacted bodily, endlessly modulated, and compulsively exercised in search of an elusive quality within the act, the gesture, of painting.