Exhibitions

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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Sheila Kernan | Everything We See
3045 Granville Street
August 7 - 21, 2021

In Everything We See, Calgary-based artist Sheila Kernan’s most recent body of work, the artist reflects upon ineffable moments in time that exist beyond description. Told through the visual conduit of Kernan’s mixed media process and shaped by her own understanding of nature's transience, the artist deconstructs the storied Canadian landscape tradition to offer a new recounting of “everything we see”.

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Nicole Katsuras | Sky Maps and Daydreams
3045 Granville Street
July 3-15, 2021

In Sky Maps and Daydreams, Toronto-based painter Nicole Katsuras continues her exploration of the intuitive process of image-making and expressive potential of the oil medium.

Drawing inspiration from a diverse history of non-representational art, from prehistoric drawings to expressionist painting, Katsuras layers her signature extruded mark-making technique and dynamic brushstrokes to create dimensional surfaces that allude to the landscape genre.

A visual record of the artist's creative process, Katsuras' canvases become a frontier for her compositional world building as peaks and crevices of colour, gestural lines and massed forms span the picture plane.

Katsuras' reimagined topographies, with their soft palettes, jewel tone accents, and shifting perspective points evoke a sense of placeless familiarity and a quality of the picturesque ideal to present a vision of the paradisiacal abstract.

July 10-24, 2021
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto

In Appearances, Cole attributes her dreamlike photography to “portraits” of anthropomorphized flowers. As the title of the series suggests, these images ask what it means to possess a form (human or otherwise) and what is considered worthy to be the subject of an artist’s attention. This exploration into transformation, nature, and beauty is marked by Cole’s exquisite use of water as a medium that naturally reshapes form.

By anthropomorphizing these flowers with stunning finesse, flitting between what we perceive as photography and painting, Cole expands the possibilities of the photograph and the act of empathy altogether. Isolated like all of us during lockdown, Cole began this series out of necessity but also as an exercise in connection. Each flower is given a human name, imbuing them with personalities which, especially during a time of isolation, remind us of personalities we have all been longing to reconnect with.

By alluding to traditional representations of flowers through her unique contemporary lens, the photographs in Appearances embody a timeless sensibility that likewise further expands Cole’s prolific body of work.

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ART CARES 2021 
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
June 22 - July 2, 2021

Art Cares was founded in May 2020 by Bau-Xi Gallery in an effort to give back and support the cities that we have called home for over 50 years. The digital charitable exhibition's first edition featured works from over 40 gallery represented artists, with over $57,000 CAD raised at the close of the inaugural programme.

Art Cares donates 100% of the listed artwork value from each piece sold, in support of Food Banks Canada. All marketing, advertising and transactional fees are covered independently by Art Cares. Art Cares 2021 closes on July 2 at 11:59 PM PST.

As essential organizations, food banks continue to support food insecure Canadians. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have been met with uncertainty, seeing a loss in financial support and support staff, and an increase in demand. Food Banks Canada has been supporting provincial food bank networks through their coronavirus response efforts, securing food, finances, and volunteers.

Eric Louie | Second Nature
June 5-19, 2021
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto

Informed by a distinct future-forward aesthetic and formalist sensibilities, Second Nature, a solo exhibition by Eric Louie, explores the interplay between organic environments and digitally composed realities. More so, Louie examines the human response to these crossovers and disparate ways of seeing. The artist’s process of digital drawing and transcribing with oil paint on canvas, delights the viewer with richly layered virtual worlds—rife with colourful shapes, shaded with brightly-hued gradients and accented with chrome-like effects to reinforce a palpable materiality.

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.

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Adrienne Dagg | Nesting Grounds 
June 5-19, 2021
340 Dundas Street, Toronto

We are thrilled to present Nesting Grounds by Adrienne Dagg, a dynamic new body of work marking the artist’s inaugural solo exhibition at Bau-Xi Gallery. Through surrealist sensibilities, Dagg creates other-worldly narratives through the dissection, deconstruction, and reconfiguration of antiquated ideologies still prevalent in contemporary society, which affect the physical and mental spaces of women today. The result is a form of collage, utilising differing painting techniques to alter visual symbols, textures, and spaces, whilst depicting scenes that are simultaneously both familiar and alien.

Domestic interiors are featured heavily as backdrops in Dagg’s painted scenes, and figures are modeled in unconventional positions, juxtaposed against outdated furniture and relics. Each narrative is constructed by incorporating real and invented scenarios, positioning the figure within a space that is both unnerving and stoic. Dagg’s female protagonists are often characterised in a way that suggest the removal or untethering of something that had once provided guidance and order.  

Born in Toronto, ON Canada, Adrienne Dagg is our newest addition to the Bau-Xi Gallery roster. A recipient of the prestigious Elizabeth Greenshields Award for figurative art, she graduated with a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal in 2011 and received her MFA from the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 2020. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and the United States and is held in many private collections. Adrienne Dagg currently lives and works from her studio in Edmonton, Alberta.

Image: George Byrne, "Ling's #2," Archival Pigment Print Mounted to Archival Substrate, Framed in White with Plexiglass, 33.75 x 41.75 inches. Edition of 5.

June 5 - 10, 2021

Bau-Xi Photo is excited to present an exhibition of works by Los Angeles-based Australian photographer George Byrne. This body of work has never been exhibited in Toronto. 

Known for his brightly coloured large-scale photographs of Los Angeles and Miami architecture, Byrne centres his practice around the documentation of the urban everyday. From parking lots to gas stations, billboards and graphic façades, Byrne meticulously frame’s his subject, almost distilling it down to a series of interlocking shapes. 

Byrne borrows from, and references, the Modernist and New topographics movements. While operating in different periods, Byrne seamlessly incorporates the banal, man-made, subject matter of the New topographics with the graphic simplicity the Modernists employed in their works.

The artist began photographing Los Angeles with a medium format camera in 2010. Byrne’s close-crop photos, often taken from the middle of the street, show careful attention to the geometric fragments of his urban surroundings revealed in the subtle line and unexpected shadow which cut across pastel walled surfaces, and divide soft sky from gritty stucco, plastic and concrete. Byrne’s work encapsulates not only the spirit of his adopted city’s unique and diverse cityscape, but an aesthetic sensibility that has come to be ubiquitous with our globalized visual culture influenced by equal parts art history and Instagram.