Pushing Paint

PUSHING PAINT KIM DORLAND GATHIE FALK PIA FRIES BEN REEVES JEAN-PAUL RIOPELLE GORDON SMITH ANGELA TENG

Equinox Gallery #110 – 525 Great Northern Way Vancouver, BC V5T 1E1 E: info@equinoxgallery.com T: 604.736.2405

PUSHING PAINT September 19 to October 24, 2015 With works by Kim Dorland Gathie Falk Pia Fries Ben Reeves Jean-Paul Riopelle Gordon Smith Angela Teng -Equinox Gallery is very pleased to present Pushing Paint, a group exhibition with works by Kim Dorland, Gathie Falk, Pia Fries, Ben Reeves, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Gordon Smith, and Angela Teng. The exhibition opens on September 19 and runs until October 24, 2015.

The artists in this exhibition are connected by their interest in modifying the behavior of paint to create works that give hints to the ways in which they were made. In discrete, individual ways, the artists disassemble and distance paint from the paintbrush, building up a threshold between the physical qualities of the paint and the image. As a result, the physical sense of the hand of the artist eminently visible in these works through intense labour, powerful gestural manipulation of material, and more subtle applications where the paint is interlaced with its support, creating a discourse between the volume of the action and the literal slipperiness of the paint. Illusory space is not disparaged in these artists’ practices; instead there is a visible curiosity in how the vernacular of paint can be pushed to dynamic, new places.

The generational spread on the artists is large (years of birth ranging from 1919 through to 1979), however the works are connected by metamodernist sensibilities that favour engagement and affect over cynicism and indifference. Whether through imagery or process (or at times, imagery and process), the familiar is presented as mysterious and cultural signifiers re-imagined through representations of the natural world. What drives these artists is resolved in works that reflect an “informed naivety [and] pragmatic idealism” and reflect the artists’ pursuit of a future with that is forever in flux.

KIM DORLAND Kim Dorland has established himself as a key contributor to contemporary painting, recognized for autobiographical paintings that explore a range of subjects including the figure, natural landscapes and urban environments that reference memories from his adolescence and more recent family life. Deeply influenced by Frank Auerbach, David Milne, and the Group of Seven, Dorland’s images have an energetic gesture, florescent pigment, and thick impasto surfaces that have come to define Dorland’s signature style.

Born in Wainwright, Alberta in 1974, Dorland spent most of his youth in Red Deer, Alberta. With the support of his partner, Lori Seymour and her family, he found a solid direction in the pursuit of his art. He completed his BFA at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and his MFA at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Dorland has shown internationally in Milan, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. His work is included in numerous collections including the Sander Collection (Berlin); Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal; Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton); Glenbow Museum (Calgary); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and numerous private collections.

Kim Dorland Lost Mother #4 2014 Oil, acrylic and spray paint on linen over wood panel 48” x 60”

Kim Dorland Bleed 2015 Oil and acrylic ink on canvas over wood panel 30” x 40”

Kim Dorland Snow Man 2015 Oil on linen 48” x 36”

GATHIE FALK Over the last 60 years, Gathie Falk has meticulously transformed – through her seemingly inexhaustible imagination objects of everyday experience into extraordinary things. Working in a variety of media that includes performance art, sculpture, ceramics, painting and drawing, Falk has produced works that feel surreal and dreamlike, reinventing clothing, fruit, plants, shoes, or baseball caps into objects of much greater significance. Although these objects are relatable in their familiarity, it is the personal symbols they carry – not the universal – that are of interest to Falk.

Gathie Falk has had over 40 solo exhibitions across Canada, and her work is represented in many public and private collections, including the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, ON), the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (Kleinberg, ON); and the Musee d’Art Contemporain (Montreal, QC). She was appointed into the Order of Canada in 1997 and the Order of British Columbia in 2002. In 2013 she received the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts.

Gathie Falk Dressed Canoe 2014 Papier Mache 125” x 18” x 13”

Gathie Falk Dressed Canoe (detail)

PIA FRIES

Pia Fries uses photographed and silkscreened elements in her work alongside and under and against fantastic piles of caked, troweled, scraped and smeared oil paint. Her extroverted passages of paint nearly always surface and submerge from areas of flat white ground and the separation of the gestures by both white spaces and the distinction of photographed marks from “real” marks keeps her work from expressionism. Each thought, however juicy, is captured and placed separately and is therefore not a painterly simulation of an ecstatic state but more possibly a dissection of one.

Born in Switzerland in 1955, Pia Fries studied sculpture at the Lucerne School of Art, Switzerland and painting with Gerhard Richter at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, Germany. Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums with recent solo shows in Zurich, Bottrop, New York, Madrid, Los Angeles, Paris, Madrid, and Winterthur, Switzerland. Her works are in the collections of Aargauer Kunsthaus; Museum of Fine Arts Bern; Stiftung Kunst Heute Bonn; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and the Museum of Art Lucerne.

Pia Fries luxen 2001 Oil on panel 39 ¼” x 47 ¼”

Pia Fries Sambin 2003 Oil on panel 43 ¼” x 57”

BEN REEVES Ben Reeves is known for his sumptuous use of paint in compositions that deftly explore the relationship between abstraction and depiction. His work is actively engaged with the theory of painting, raising questions about the authenticity of imagery, while remaining deceptively traditional. At first glance, many of his works appear to borrow generously from 19th-century realism, yet they are often meticulously conceptual.

Ben Reeves has had solo exhibitions at Museum London (2006); Oakville Galleries, (2005) and Equinox Gallery, Vancouver (2010, 2012). His work has also been included in The Painting Project: A Snapshot of Painting in Canada, Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal (2013); Take Your Time, Simon Fraser University Art Gallery, Burnaby (2009); Shifting Space, Museum of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongquing, China (2005), and For the Record: Drawing Contemporary Life, Vancouver Art Gallery (2003). Reeves’ works are in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Museum London.

Ben Reeves golfers 2015 Oil, watercolour and acrylic over panel 48” x 56 ¾”

Ben Reeves golfers (detail)

Ben Reeves city below 2015 Oil, watercolour and acrylic on canvas 90” x 72”

Ben Reeves city below (detail)

JEAN-PAUL RIOPELLE Jean-Paul Riopelle was born in Quebec in 1923. In 1942 he enrolled at the école des Beaux-Arts in Montreal but shifted his studies to the much less academic approach at the école du Meuble, graduating in 1945. There he studied with PaulEmile Borduas, a teacher who was extremely dedicated to his students and gave them a great deal of freedom. It was under Borduas's direction that Riopelle made his first abstract painting. Borduas and several of his students, including Riopelle, formed a group named the Automatistes, known for their spontaneous method of painting, which drew on the subconscious as a source. Riopelle pioneered a style of painting where large quantities of varied coloured paints were thickly applied to the canvas with a trowel. He was represented in New York and participated in the biennials of contemporary art in Venice (1954) and Sao Paulo (1955).

Jean-Paul Riopelle Early Morning 1957 Oil on canvas 25 ½” x 31 ¾”

GORDON SMITH Gordon Smith is a key figure in contemporary Canadian art. Since the 1950s, he has worked continuously to expand the dialogue between abstraction and representation. In his tangled paintings, there is the insinuation of entire fields of colour below the surface. Over the course of his 75 year long career he has made paintings employing that procedure of looping and overlapping, the movement of line to line, texture into texture and colour into colour.

Gordon Smith was born in 1919 in East Brighton, England and immigrated to Canada in 1933 where he attended the Winnipeg School of Art. Upon his return from fighting in WWII, he settled with his wife Marion in Vancouver, and graduated from the Vancouver School of Art. His many major awards include the Order of Canada (1996) and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts (2007). Gordon Smith’s work is included in numerous public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Gordon Smith E.V. 17 2015 Mixed media and acrylic on canvas 20” x 20” x 2 ¾”

Gordon Smith E.V. 23 2015 Acrylic and mixed media on panel 32 ¼” x 32 ¼”

ANGELA TENG Angela Teng’s work reconsiders what is traditionally required to make a painting, and then suggesting otherwise by renegotiating how a picture can be made. Her recent body of work utilizes a labored dedication to the process of craft, through abstraction and studio-based exploration of materials and painting. By crocheting acrylic paint, Teng eliminates the support (stretcher bars and canvas) to make room for the paint to stand alone. Her patterns generate an optical buzz created from the marbling of paint, wobbly form, and through experimenting and observing the optical interaction of colours one upon another.

Teng received her BFA from Emily Carr University in 2011. In 2015 she had her first solo exhibition, Gentle Groove, at WAAP, Vancouver, BC. Teng was the recipient of the BC Arts Council Senior Scholarship (2009) and the Whistler Arts Council Award of Excellence (2010).

Angela Teng Ringer 2015 Crocheted acrylic paint on aluminum panel 23 ½” x 18”

Angela Teng Golden Boy 2015 Crocheted acrylic paint on aluminum panel 16 ¾” x 22”

Angela Teng L.A. Dreamer 2015 Crocheted acrylic paint on aluminum panel 20 ½” x 17”

Equinox Gallery #110 – 525 Great Northern Way Vancouver, BC V5T 1E1 E: info@equinoxgallery.com T: 604.736.2405