Abstract Answers
Abstract Answers
October 21 - December 20, 2019
Curated by Dr. Riva Symko
The Canadian Context
The history of twentieth-century Canadian painting is still relatively marginalized in relation to the established historical colonial canon – which remains dominated by developments in European and American painting. Nevertheless, since the end of WWII in Canada, an “abstract impulse” has manifested in several significant regional movements from the geometric abstraction of les Automatistes and les Plasticiens in Québec, to the expressionism of Painters Eleven and the Regina Five in English Canada, to the traditional abstract figurations of Woodlands Painting (Anishinaabe) from the Great Lakes area. Viewed from an historical lens, this impulse reflects tensions between the French-Canadian versus English-Canadian identity struggles that were potent in the first-half of the twentieth-century. In turn, this struggle can be positioned against the broader Canadian quest for international recognition in European and American contexts (and markets).
The impulse persists today as Canadian artists continue to engage a wide range of abstract painting practices reflecting their varied regional, cultural, and gendered identities. For instance, over the last six years, fourteen out of eighteen winners of the lucrative RBC Canadian Painting Competition have been abstract painters. Designed to support artists at the early stages of their careers, this award is often touted as a litmus for emerging practices.
Abstract Answers
This exhibition brings together the work of four contemporary Canadian women artists exploring the limits of abstraction, representation, and expression as a feminist political strategy. These abstract painters are re-writing the dominant art historical narrative of abstraction as an exclusively Modernist (i.e. early twentieth-century), masculine-centered, Euro-colonial endeavor. The artists included in Abstract Answers are particularly interested in exploring their identities via abstract models. These abstractions have the ability to render the individual experience as a shared, collective experience in a way that recalls early Canadian modernism while simultaneously critically re-thinking this history.
Ultimately, the goal of this exhibition is to explore the historical context of abstract painting in Canada as an experimental and experiential site of (French, European, and Indigenous) identity politics, and to (re-)write this history as a specifically Canadian contribution to the broader history of abstraction.
Abstract Answers is the third-part of an exhibition trilogy exploring contemporary feminist approaches to medium and representation. The first of this trilogy was Bodies Under Pressure (Spring 2018), which featured the work of five printmakers (and a portfolio) from across the United States and Canada unified by their ongoing consideration of the three-dimensional human body as a site of history, trauma, and healing. The second exhibition in this trilogy was The Bounded Text (Fall 2018), which included five national and international fiber artists united by their interest in rendering, applying, and utilizing text through a variety of techniques.
Featuring the work of:
The Kimura Gallery gratefully acknowledges that this exhibition is sponsored by an Elizabeth Tower Endowment Faculty Award for Research, Study, or Presentation in or about Canada.