Gallery Artists | Sculpture Feature
January 13-27, 2024
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
This January, Bau-Xi Dufferin is thrilled to present Sculpture Feature, that will showcase the sculptural work of Tom Burrows, Ted Fullerton, Joshua Jensen-Nagle, and Will Robinson.
See how each artist transcends the meaning of sculpture through their own unique practices, using a variety of materials and techniques to bring these artworks to life.
Gallery Artists | 2024 A Year In Preview
January 13-27, 2024
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
This January, Bau-Xi Dufferin presents Year In Preview, a curated selection of artworks to preview our exhibiting artists for the year ahead. Featuring works by Chris Shepherd, Kyle Scheurmann, Kathryn Macnaughton, Janna Watson, Erin Armstrong, among other gallery artists!
We are delighted to showcase highlighted artworks by each artist that best represent their unique creative styles and talents. Please join us this January to view these breathtaking pieces in person and celebrate what is to come in 2024.
Barbara Cole | Somewhere
December 1-22, 2023
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday December 2, 2-4 pm | Artist in Attendance
Bau-Xi Gallery is thrilled to present Somewhere, an all-new exhibition by celebrated Toronto-based photographer, Barbara Cole.
In this series, Cole continues her exploration into the transformative nature of the figure within dreamlike scenes, where women float across spaces adorned with heavy chandeliers, wide marble steps, gilded mirrors, and centuries-old master portraits. There is an otherworldliness that cloaks these scenes, enticing viewers to embrace a sense of wonder and enter a realm that exists between the real and the imagined.
Somewhere is ultimately about the joy of play, transcending time and perception. It merges the worlds of the underwater and the above water experience, tracing historical eras and the multiplicity of human emotions. It is an exploration of the spaces that ignite our imaginations, where friendships flourish and individuals find their own unique expression. Within the luxurious surroundings and the rich tapestry of the imagination, a beautiful alchemy emerges: a harmonious blending of elements that sparks the creation of something truly extraordinary.
Cole has won prestigious awards such as the Grand Prize at the Festival International de la Photographie de Mode in Cannes, and third prize at the International Photography Awards in New York. In 2012, the acclaimed documentary series Snapshot: The Art of Photography II featured an episode devoted exclusively to Cole’s photographic practice. Barbara Cole lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
Darlene Cole | Prelude
December 1-22, 2023
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday December 2, 2-4 pm | Artist in Attendance
This December, Bau-Xi Gallery is delighted to present Prelude, an all-new exhibition by renowned Canadian painter, Darlene Cole.
In her latest for the gallery, Darlene Cole presents a stunning collection of oil paintings evoking her signature ethereal scenes. Often familiar and mysterious all at once, Cole's pieces are imbued with a sense of curiosity, playfulness, and an element of open-ended mystery.
On Prelude, the artist writes, "As in the prelude of a suite, each painting acts as a springboard to what comes next. Figures are surrounded by elements of nature and water, inviting an immersion into the body of work with each gestural moment."
Darlene Cole captures a hazy, haunting world of poetry and wonder. The artist’s distinct oil painting techniques lend a watercolour effect to her subjects without compromising rich colour values and velvety textures. Cole’s canvases—dreamy expanses inhabited by spirited figures—are studies of time and memory. These figures, both human and animal, play a pivotal role, evoking emotional responses in the viewer as Cole navigates between layers of reference and meaning. At once playful and melancholic, Cole’s work draws on themes characteristic of her established painting career: the inherent mystery of old architectural interiors, the power of painterly colour and texture to spark memory, and the exploration of childhood innocence and its loss.
Cole's work is extensively collected across Canada and internationally. Notable public collections include: The Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Tom Thomson Art Gallery, the K.F. Preueter Collection of Canadian Art, Royal Bank of Canada, CIBC, OCAD University, Fairmont Hotels (Toronto, Montreal, Banff), and Manulife Financial.
HOLIDAY | New Works by Gallery Artists
December 9-23, 2023
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday December 9, 2-4pm
Bau-Xi Vancouver is pleased to present our annual holiday group exhibition, featuring beautiful new works in the spirit of the season.
The exhibition includes works by Vicky Christou, Eric Louie, Sylvia Tait, Kyle Scheurmann, Cori Creed, Anne Griffiths, Casey McGlynn and more.
Vicki Smith | Ripple Effect
November 18-30, 2023
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday November 18, 2-4pm
Bau-Xi Vancouver presents Ripple Effect, the highly anticipated solo exhibition from Toronto based artist Vicki Smith. Vicki Smith is a painter whose goal is peace. These evocative new images, replete with the calm energy of Smith's own meditation practice, feature the artist's incredible skill with the brush in capturing the look and movement of water. They draw in the viewer, prompting memories of times when swimming and floating enabled moments of solace amidst the cacophony of life.
Artist Statement:
Appearing from The Walrus magazine and Connor Garrel, upon express request of the artist as her favoured artist and show statement:
"All of the women in Vicki Smith's paintings are suspended, floating in water and time. They court peace in pools and lakes. postponing gravity, going nowhere fast. Sometimes you can glimpse some rocks or stretch of shore at the edge of a frame, but mostly they are alone, buoyant and unbothered. These scenes are rendered almost romantically, with impasto snarls of blue and green and ochre, and when Smith talks about them, she uses words like "serene", and "meditation", and "memory". She doesn't even think of her women as "swimmers", she says. "To me, it's more intangible than that, a limitlessness that's closer to flying."
-Connor Garrel on Vicki Smith, July/August 2023
The Constructed Landscape
November 4-16, 2023 | Upper Gallery
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents The Constructed Landscape, a specially curated exhibition featuring photographic works by Bau-Xi’s urban landscape photographers.
In the Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation, Fabrizio Nevola provided the following: “The study and practice of urbanism has been defined as “broadly encompass[ing] town planning and urban improvement, often a technical activity overseen by professionals; it is also taken to relate to the processes and interactions of urban society with the built environment, a more all-encompassing definition in which agency is afforded to urban populations in the shaping of the environment they inhabit.” (November 29, 2018).
Feats of engineering, technology and urban planning all contribute to the structure of a city: a composite of built environments designed to enhance and help us navigate contemporary life. The Constructed Landscape focuses on these built surroundings and the multiple ways in which they can be viewed, from the impressive patterning of a fully designed and realized community to the humble materials used to build it. This photography-based exhibition seeks to contrast the awe-inspiring and ever-evolving methods of transportation and achievements in architecture with the very real consequences of technical breakthroughs: a faster, bigger, and more rigorously designed city benefits the quality of life for its inhabitants as much as it produces complexities!
Bringing together works by George Byrne, Jeffrey Milstein, Anthony Redpath, Chris Shepherd, and the late Michael Wolf, this exhibition pays specific attention to capturing human interaction with and within the urban landscape. Whether it be an emotional response to organic presence in a constructed world, seeing familiar scenes anew through unexpected perspectives, or the creation of human connections - however lasting or fleeting - as we co-exist, the presence of life is essential to envisioning and reshaping the cities we inhabit.
David T. Alexander | Less Trodden Lands Curate My Point of View
November 9 - 29, 2023
1384 Dufferin St. Toronto
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 9, 5-7 pm
Bau-Xi Gallery is thrilled to present Less Trodden Lands Curate My Point of View, an all-new exhibition by renowned Canadian painter, David T. Alexander.
In the artist’s latest collection for the gallery, Alexander celebrates nearly 60 years of artistry and creative expression, presenting a suite of stunning new landscape pieces. His depictions of real and fictive landscapes are as poignant and powerful as ever, revealing decades-long explorations of geography, nature, and culture.
On his new exhibition, Alexander states,
“The three types of landscapes I engage in are mountains, prairies, and coastal areas. Repeated trips to the Arctic and other remote places have always been of great interest to me, getting to these less trodden places was a complex and fulfilling journey. Hiking, drawing, and recording the vastness of the land over an extended period has always been important to me.
Many of my early trips to remote places were on ships and treks under the midnight sun and the aurora borealis which is impossible to paint. Experiences in these travels have always allowed me to curate a personal point of view towards nature and wildlife.
It’s hard to take in the complexity of a sense of nothingness in a natural desert or grassland of the plains of Saskatchewan or being overwhelmed by the enormity of a huge mountain other than experiencing it in person. I need another lifetime and a half to satisfy my mind about nature.”
David T. Alexander’s work can be found in many prominent public, private and corporate collections throughout the world, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of London, the University of Toronto, Concordia University, the Museum of Art in Iceland, HBC Global Art Collection in New York, and in Embassies in Berlin, Beijing, and Krakow. Corporate and private collections include those in major Canadian cities as well as Dubai, Seoul, New York, Mumbai, and Nice, among several others.
Nicole Katsuras | All the Colours of the Moon
November 9 - 29, 2023
1384 Dufferin St. Toronto
Opening Reception: Thursday November 9, 5-7 pm | Artist in Attendance
Bau-Xi Gallery is delighted to present All the Colours of the Moon, an all-new exhibition by Toronto-based artist, Nicole Katsuras.
For centuries, we have looked to the moon for inspiration, interpreting its surface, and reconciling these interpretations with the beliefs and ideas of our times. Today, the moon remains an object for the imagination to explore while becoming a part of our collective memory and history.
Toronto-based artist Nicole Katsuras’ newest collection, All the Colours of the Moon, draws its title from a photographic series of the same name by artist Marcella Giulia Pace which captured lunar variations over a decade, collecting them in one striking composite to showcase the moon's many different faces, colours, and shapes, influenced by the earth's changing atmospheric molecules, light and materials.
The paintings featured in All the Colours of the Moon are lyrical abstractions rooted in Katsuras’ stream of consciousness and intuitive mark-making methods. Full of movement, colour, and form, the artist expertly juxtaposes varied gradient grounds with radiant thin and thick oil paint dragged, brushed, pushed, pulled, and extruded onto the canvas. Painting is let loose in service of discovering the medium’s pleasures and possibilities.
The gestural works of Abstract Expressionism, Ukiyo-e, Cobra, Impressionism, and the notable series by Taiso Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, all serve as influences on the collection, however, there is no single narrative that underpins Katsuras’ work. The viewer is invited to contemplate and interpret these abstract dreamscapes and floating worlds of spectral forms.
Steven Nederveen | Special Trees
November 4-16, 2023
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday November 4, 2-4pm
Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents Special Trees, the new exhibition from Toronto based artist Steven Nederveen. This timely and moving series focuses on the evolving understanding of community amongst trees, and what humans can learn from embracing and emulating the trees' natural practice of working together and helping each other. Nederveen is known for drawing connections between our natural environment and aspects of spirituality through an artistic process that combines painting and photography. By combining and integrating these mediums, Nederveen develops a magical realism that insists on new perspectives on the landscape genre.
Artist statement:
For the past 15 years I have used my depiction of trees to evoke an "austere and serene beauty, expressing a mood of spiritual solitude recognized in Zen Buddhist philosophy” (from the Definition of Wabi). My trees represented the isolation, strength and stillness we have within ourselves. In this latest body of work, my trees focus on the communal aspects of life. I've added vibrant colors and delicate patterns to small tree groupings to imply connectedness: a vision of trees as having families and communities. This comes from relatively recent scientific research that has revealed that trees have a complex and interconnected social network. Through their root systems and underground fungi networks, trees are able to communicate with each other and share resources, such as nutrients and water. This network is sometimes referred to as the "wood wide web". The concept of the "wood wide web" highlights the importance of interconnectedness and community, and that trees are not the solitary plants we once thought, but are actually living in dynamic relationships to the other plants, able to work together to raise saplings, ward off intruders and send warnings. Just as humans rely on each other for support, cooperation, and empathy, trees also depend on each other for their survival.
-Steven Nederveen, 2023
Sheri Bakes | An Origami of Wind
October 21 - November 2, 2023
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday October 21, 2-4pm | Artist in Attendance
Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents An Origami of Wind, the new solo exhibition of atmospheric works from BC based artist Sheri Bakes. Inspired by the forests of Vancouver Island and North Vancouver, these atmospheric paintings reflect the artist’s ongoing interest in wind, motion, and meditative breathwork, with fine attention given to light and its stippled effect. Bakes’ ever-present indication of movement, breath and life-force - the unseen made visible - connects all her images. inviting quiet contemplation.
Artist’s statement:
This new body of work is an exploration of landscape around Vancouver Island as well as Vancouver’s North Shore mountains. When I lived in Vancouver I hiked in the North Shore mountains with my dogs 4-5 times a week in the mornings through the spring, summer and fall months. We mostly hiked a couple trails on Mt. Seymour, and the more we hiked these trails the more I felt the ever changing landscape occupying space inside myself: the boundary perception between inside and outside of myself became very thin. I suppose this is also true for the areas of Vancouver Island I’ve been fortunate enough to explore. I think I gravitate towards certain kinds of energy and these two places offer this specific energy and light in really strong, consistent abundance.
Wind, much like origami (the Japanese art of paper folding) moves through landscape, folding land into a kinetic sculpture of shapes. This show is a moving meditation on the relationship of origami in nature.
-Sheri Bakes 2023
Joshua Jensen-Nagle | Sunsets and Fireworks
October 5 - 29, 2023
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin: 1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
Opening Reception: Thursday October 5, 5-7 pm | Artist in Attendance
To make this body of work, Jensen-Nagle photographs inspirational sunsets, prints them large-scale in his Toronto studio, and then re-photographs them outside, setting off fireworks in their foreground, ultimately creating a celebratory effect with explosive colour palettes, breath-taking compositions, and quiet moments of underlying reflection.
Jensen-Nagle states, “Throughout my career nostalgia has remained a consistent theme across my work. Rather than simply documenting a reality, I strive to create a dream-like state in my imagery. With this series, I found myself reflecting on the most nostalgic moments in my life; the ritual of watching the sunset each evening and lighting off fireworks for holiday celebrations. Sunsets and Fireworks commemorates my happiest moments, celebrates life’s simple pleasures, and expresses the light they have brought into my life.”
The inaugural images in this series were originally photographed in Canouan Island, Nosara, Los Angeles, Antigua, Mexico, Hawaii, The Bahamas, and Lake Erie.