Exhibitions

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.

HER | Group Exhibition
August 10-24, 2019
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 10, 2019, 2-4 PM

Her brings together and celebrates the works of four women artists, comprised of two painters and two photographers, who have each become recognized for their respective representations of the female form.
 
Painter Darlene Cole’s lyrical and poetic renditions of solitary figures or small gathering of females in various stages of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood evoke a sense of memory or fleeting experience. The paintings for Her depict figures immersed in an intimate moment.

In her Falling Through Time series, photographer Barbara Cole emphasizes dynamism and power of the female form in movement and a seamless catapulting back and forth between future and past self in time and technique.
In Barbara Cole’s Meditation series, a restrained atmosphere of stillness and contemplation pervades.
 
Like Barbara Cole, painter Vicki Smith also concentrates on the female form as it moves through water. Her swimmers evoke a feeling of freedom and expansiveness and a possibility for transformation as they calmly float or swim in lakes and swimming pools.
 
Photographer Virginia Mak’s soft-focus images from her Composed Series in this exhibition pay homage to the creative women in her life while her Stillness series turns a more inward gaze towards self-reflection and growth.
 
The exhibition seeks to provide ‘a room of one’s own’ to highlight the multiplicity of views on the female form by four strong female artists.

Sheila Kernan | Forever Is A Feeling
August 10-24, 2019
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 10, 2019, 2-4 PM, Artist in Attendance

Forever Is A Feeling marks emerging Calgary-based painter Sheila Kernan's inaugural exhibition at Bau-Xi Vancouver. Known for her intensely saturated palette and tactile surfaces, Kernan's meticulously composed images begin with large-scale drawings and photo-montages drawn from references collected over a ten-year span and comprise skillfully layered mixed-media elements and gestural impasto.

In Forever Is A Feeling, Kernan remarks on time — its inevitable passage and the myriad ways in which we keep it— and memory, in its capacity as living record and capricious witness. Kernan's engagement with these themes emerge through her practice in various ways: her preparatory collages become disparate visual memories, rearranged piecemeal; the gradual accumulation, blending and erasing of her dry brush technique echo acts of forgetting and remembrance, while her intricate hand-cut stencils and their graphic forms evoke the omitting and softening effects of recollection.

Mediated by the artist's lived experience, distinct sensibility, and richly complex process, Kernan's re-imagining of the Canadian landscape as a constructed space is informed by our collective conception of the genre and its source material, taking on new and richer depths of meaning with the act of viewing. Through interactions with her personal history, Kernan endeavors to fix the fleeting instant and the sense of infinitude captured within it by rendering tangible, immutable paintings which invoke those singular moments in time.

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Emerging Now: Selected Works from the OCADU Drawing and Painting Class of 2019
July 13-27, 2019
340 Dundas Street W, Toronto, Upper Gallery
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 13, 2-4 PM 

Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto is located in one of the most energetic artistic neighbourhoods in the city, in part because of its close proximity to the esteemed OCAD University. For the month of July, a selection of works by recent OCADU graduates from the Drawing and Painting class of 2019 will be featured in our Upper Gallery. We are thrilled to have this emerging talent participate in our summer programme.

Featured Works: 

Ahlena Sultana-McGarry, The Red-Eye of June, Digital Collage Printed on Cold Pressed Natural Paper, 30 x 24 inches, 2019, $1,500 CAD

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Ahlena Sultana-McGarry, Dreaming of Tiger Spring, Digital Collage Printed on Cold Pressed Natural Paper, 24 x 30 inches, 2019, $1,500 CAD

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Alexandra Marcuzzi, Body Fragments Part III - Rose, Collage in Resin on Oil Panel, 12 x 12 inches, 2019, $600 CAD

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 Alexandra Marcuzzi, Body Fragments Part III - Plum, Collage in Resin on Oil Panel, 12 x 12 inches, 2019, $600 CAD

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Alexandra Marcuzzi, Fragmentation III, Charcoal on Illustration Board, 30 x 40 inches, 2019, $1,950 CAD

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Desiree Nechacov, Superposition I, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 36 inches, 2019, $2,950 CAD

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Desiree Nechacov, Superposition II, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 36 inches, 2019, $2,950 CAD

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Donny Nie, Hollandaise, Oil on Wood Panel, 72 x 48 inches, 2019, $3,450 CAD - SOLD

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Donny Nie, Rose Honey, Oil on Wood Panel, 72 x 48 inches, 2019, $3,450 CAD - SOLD

Mashayla Ritchie, Mouth Full of Gum, Acrylic, Charcoal, Conte, Acrylic Marker, and Oil Pastel on Canvas, 48 x 48 inches, 2019, $2,950 CAD

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Mikayla Lacey, in hopes of peeling back the skin, Acrylic and Charcoal on Canvas, 68 x 56 inches, 2019, $3,750 CAD

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Nikola Sakell, Like the calmness of waves as they take their turn weaving back and forth between the khaki shallows and indigo depths, as blood skies and amethyst clouds become monstrous on the horizon, Acrylic on Canvas, 78 x 96 inches, 2019, $4,950 CAD - SOLD

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Vicky Christou | Duality
July 13-27, 2019
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 13, 2019, 2-4 PM 

Vicky Christou’s abstract grid paintings are inspired by the dualistic and eternal processes found within oceanic waves, densely forested landscapes and expansive changing skies.

Her meditative, ritualistic application of paint depicts a physical record of time, resulting in the experience of an encompassing peaceful stillness. Christou often uses a minimal color palette, adding to the sculptural effect of her grid paintings.  Her more colorful works often become directional, dependant on where the veiwer is standing, offering a playful interactive optical element.

Christou has expanded her accumulative impasto line painting technique, to include brushwork and washes.  She continues her focused exploration of paint materiality with a foundational reference to textiles. 

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Kathryn Macnaughton | MOVED
July 13-27, 2019
340 Dundas Street W, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 13, 2-4 PM 

Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto is pleased to be exhibiting Moved, the latest series of abstract works by painter Kathryn Macnaughton. “Moved” describes a state both physical and emotional; a concept that resonates with the artist in a period of literal and symbolic transition in her life and career.

Macnaughton’s paintings are equally full of movement – manifested with the layering of undulating abstract forms over a base layer of organic loose washes. This marrying of two distinct techniques results in exhilarating canvases of contradiction: at once contemporary and timeless, flat and sculptural, compiled and uniform, static and unmistakably alive.

A graduate of OCAD, Macnaughton has exhibited in both Canada and abroad since 2010.

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Richard Barnes | Gallery Feature
July 13-27, 2019
350 Dundas Street W, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 13, 2019, 2-4 PM 

This July, Bau-Xi Photo is excited to feature Animal Logic, the award-winning series by acclaimed fine art photographer Richard Barnes. Animal Logic reveals the curious beauty of animals being prepared for display in natural history museums. Barnes, who is based in New York, spent over 10 years building this series, cataloging methods of collecting, conserving and exhibiting elements of the natural world. Drawing inspiration from science, history, archaeology, and anthropology, Barnes’ work offers a reminder that there is nothing inher­ently natural about viewing animals in a museum, an irony that is underscored by photographs that show the care taken to preserve taxidermy specimens, placing them into artificial landscapes, similar to ones they once called home.

Barnes’ work has been shown in solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, the Cranbrook Art Museum, and the University of Michigan Art Museum. He has lectured at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, Parsons School of Art and Design, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; he has taught at the California College or the Arts, and has served as an adjunct professor at the San Francisco Art Institute.

His works can be found in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.  He is the recipient of the prestigious Julius Schulman Award for 2011. He was previously a recipient of the Rome Prize 2005-2006 and his photographs of the cabin of Ted Kaczynski, aka the "Unabomber," were featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and awarded the Alfred Eisenstadt Award for Photography.

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Jamie Evrard | Of Innocence and Experience
June 1-15, 2019
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 1, 2019, 2-4 PM 

Of Innocence and Experience — the latest exhibition by floral painter Jamie Evrard — adopts its title from the collected poems of William Blake. Like Blake, Evrard's stylistic language is distinctly one of powerful and concise lyricism. The contrary states of "innocence" and "experience" named in Blake's famed work speaks to both the artist's process as well as to the physical qualities and changing nature of her floral subject.

Speaking on her practice, the artist describes the daily undertaking of painting and the ways in which her compositions, rife with diaphanous brushwork, delicate accents, and high colour washes, come together:

Oftentimes, Evrard’s works are hard-won marvels — borne of five-o’clock starts, flipped canvasses and painted over false starts — which gradually transform into richly layered records of the time spent in her studio and visual testaments to the artist’s creative experience.

On rarer occasion, by her own admission, Evrard’s approach towards the blank canvas takes on a guileless openness and intuitive certainty, which manifests in striking directness, unencumbered looseness, and warm familiarity in the artist’s handling of the oil medium.

As Evrard embraces her concurrent approaches to painting, so too does she insist on the varied forms of her subject matter, rejecting the pristine beauty of perfect blooms in favor of tentative buds, bruised petals, and overblown blossoms,  in a dedicated exploration and fervent celebration of innocence and experience.

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