Follow Friday: The North, North America Edition
There’s plenty to do and see in Toronto this week, as the city plays host to powerhouse fair Art Toronto. Here, we take a closer look at four galleries from across Canada—and, to top it off, one American gallery that’s not too far south of the border.
First established in 2002 and newly located in an up-and-coming industrial Vancouver neighborhood, Winsor Gallery demonstrates a dedication to the larger practices of their exhibiting artists, often posting studio visits and video interviews on their site. Winsor’s current show features a series of new oil paintings by Rimi Yang, a Los Angeles-based artist who was born to Korean parents and raised in Japan. Their booth at this week’s Art Toronto brings together works by a host of contemporary Canadian artists: Douglas Coupland, Attila Richard Lukacs, Fiona Ackerman, Rodney Graham, Graham Gillmore, Angela Grossman, David Robinson, and the Ukraine-born Vitaly Medvedovsky.
Galerie Laroche/Joncas has been supporting the work of both emerging and established artists since their opening in Montréal in 2005. The gallery has a booth at Feature: Contemporary Art Fair this week that showcases the work of two Québec-based artists—the hallucinatory, digital-as-manual images of painter Dan Brault and the mixed-material distorted figures of sculptor Gilles Mihalcean, whose pieces will also be on view in a solo exhibition at the gallery next month. The gallery space is currently devoted to a group of paintings and sculptures by American artist Benjamin King, in a show titled “Various Deposits.”
Founded in 2008 as a space for exhibiting photography, Toronto gallery O’Born Contemporary has since grown to include works in all media. In conjunction with their exhibition schedule, the gallery hosts a number of lectures, discussions, and critiques to support their mandate to engage a critical dialogue around contemporary art. This week, their Art Toronto booth features works by Canadian artists Alex Fischer, Edith Maybin, John Monteith, Callum Schuster, and Jill Greenberg, American artist Kate McQuillen, and the Hong Kong-born Dominic Nahr, as well as Toronto-based collectives Soft Turns and Public Studio.
It’s a busy season for Postma Fine Art, as the Calgary dealer prepares to open a new appraisal office and gallery space early next year. In keeping with the wide scope of their inventory, their booth at Art Toronto foregrounds a group of painters significant to the history of Canadian art, among them Jean-Paul Riopelle, Claude Tousignant, Group of Seven member Alexander Young Jackson, and noted Inuit artist Pudlo Pudlat, along with contemporary artists, including painters Rachael Levine, Margaret Chwialkowska, and Peter Rotter, and sculptors Mark Edward Adams and Joe Fafard. The booth also features a unique collaboration between Painters Eleven founder William Ronald and his wife Alana Ronald, who was on site this week to talk about her work and her husband’s legacy.
Portland’s Upfor, founded in 2013, highlights the use of digital processes and new media in the group of innovative artists they represent. Now on view at the gallery is “Critter,” their show of Ralph Pugay’s bright, comical paintings, and up next is an exhibition of computer programmer-turned-artist Akihiko Miyoshi’s experimental images, and a booth at Miami Beach’s UNTITLED. Art Fair in December. The gallery’s roster also includes American artists Ben Buswell, Jack Featherly, Brenna Murphy, Jordan Rathus, and Katie Torn, and multimedia Chilean artist Rodrigo Valenzuela.
Follow Winsor Gallery, Galerie Laroche/Joncas, O’Born Contemporary, Postma Fine Art, and Upfor on Artsy.
