Exhibitions

Steven Nederveen | Home
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
November 20 - December 2, 2021

Steven Nederveen reframes the grandeur of the Canadian landscape to reflect the essence and lifeforce of Home. By interweaving the mediums of photography and painting, Nederveen conjures a magical realism that brings forth new perspectives on the landscape genre.

Artist’s Exhibition Statement:

During the period of covid in which travel was difficult and we were all stuck at home, I got to thinking what “home” is to me. Home, it turns out, is many things - friends, family, connection, inner peace, playing with my kids. I decided to focus on home as an internal place of stillness and quietude, a place of reflection and contemplation. I have imbued images of island coastlines with these traits. I spent a lot of time as a kid sailing with my family around these islands and have felt the deep sense of peace that speaks through the water and the land. Small islands, distant shores, the open horizon - these take on the feeling of sacred ground, of places to protect. Home is just that: a cherished space with its own life and vitality, each one different and unique. 

Eric Louie | Remembered Futures
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
November 6 - 18, 2021

Eric Louie calls on us to consider memories of the past as well as the unformed future in “Remembered Futures”, his collection of dynamic and shimmering new abstract paintings.

Artist’s exhibition statement:

My current inspiration is the idea of gathering and synthesizing past thoughts and ideas to formulate or imagine the future. I've been thinking about the notion of creating memories, especially ones made while on vacation or on an adventure: employing moments in the future to collect and save the past in a digital moment. These new paintings transport the viewer to different imagined places - places fabricated from past experiences, filtered, idealized and hyperbolized to some utopian end.

Michelle Nguyen | Water Features
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
October 16 - 30, 2021

"Water Features", Michelle Nguyen's fourth show with Bau-Xi, uses human and animal bodies in varying states to explore notions of identity, existence, historical erasure and ecological grief. Her canvases are populated by elegant, humorous or even grotesque figures, in conjunction with carefully selected vegetation and objects – all often iterations of classical motifs - that appear to be part dream, part nightmare, struggling with the dissolution of self. Nguyen uses vividly coloured oil paints to conjure worlds dense with magical realism, symbolism, and narrative, prompted by her own experiences and observations as a child of Vietnamese refugees. 

Casey McGlynn | Shipwrights and Magpies
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto
October 2 - 16, 2021

In "Shipwrights and Magpies", acclaimed painter Casey McGlynn explores the joys and pains of human connection. Since moving to an airport hangar where he spends his time repairing a ship, McGlynn has met many interesting characters who inspired him to create this bold series of colourful mixed media paintings and collages. Recognizable forms blend with abstraction, breathing life into a chaotic scene filled with emotion. The collection is completed by two calmer images depicting single ships on the water, with McGlynn’s signature vivid pop of colour.  

Casey McGlynn’s paintings are visual composites of autobiography and collective memory, at once literal and endlessly symbolic. Highly referential images—animals, people, popular media, textual documents—narrate scenes from the artist’s life while also prompting the viewer’s imagination through allegory and archetype. Working with a combination of techniques, McGlynn imbues this timeless visual repertoire with contemporary life: adventurous explorations of colour, humour, and satire are delivered with what Gary Michael Dault, writing for the Globe and Mail, called “a warm and somehow compassionate abandon.” Indeed, McGlynn’s compositions capture life’s chaos while also allowing his viewer the contemplative space to insert his or her own story.

McGlynn’s works can be found in a number of private and public collections in both Canada and the US. Most recently his work was acquired for the HBC Global Art Collection, New York.

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Isabelle Menin | Natural Order
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto
October 2-16, 2021

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present Natural Order, an exhibition of photographs by acclaimed Belgian artist Isabelle Menin.

Menin weaves digital configuration and her eye for radiant colour to masterfully compose images that suggest both form and distortion.

The flora within these realms, which Menin describes as “disordered landscapes”, are individually documented, each flower carefully lit, and painstakingly captured as part of the artist's eye for intricacy. These powerful symbols act as the mode for Menin's signature mark-making — abstracted and revolved, their petals and stems become a means to enact the artist's disembodied gestures. 

Drawing connections to "nature's strange complexity" and that of human nature, Menin's photography is caught in a state of perpetual transformation. Transcribed with playful artifice and hybridized through her distinct aesthetic "hand", Menin subverts our understanding of her subject matter, unraveling their contextual meaning to render them anew.

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Pat O'Hara | Gestures
3045 Granville Street
September 4 - 25, 2021

Vancouver-based painter Pat O'Hara's dynamic latest series spotlights her keen ability to juxtapose decisive colour and line with marks of free-flowing, untethered emotion. Elaborating upon the prevalent motifs of her past Linearity and Serpentine series, O'Hara's graphic bands of colour intermingle with a joyful frenzy of stippling and dripping gestures. Her bright, vintage-inspired colour palette and bold strokes conjure the warmth of past memories while simultaneously expressing optimism for the future.

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Bratsa Bonifacho | Celebration
3045 Granville Street
September 4 - 25, 2021

Acclaimed painter Bratsa Bonifacho returns to form with new vigor in his latest series, Celebration. Reflecting on his decades-long career and his past bodies of work, Bonifacho breaks new ground in his ongoing engagement with semiotics and iconography with his exploration of gridwork and negative space layered over brilliant colour.

The result is a visually fresh textural effect, and a new pictorial lexicon: an abstracted "language" system of characters and symbols that ingeniously references the connecting thread between ancient scripts and modern digital cipher.

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