![]() ![]() ![]() She was a gestural painter, making her mark with drips and swoops, yet architectural line gives her work its rigour.Īnd beyond these observations about her style, there are her themes. While she was an abstractionist, she was not a formalist: As that slave ship suggests, her work is filled with explicit content. First, monumental abstract painting is a medium traditionally associated with men, and Thomasos, a Black woman and committed painter from the age of 15, blew past those limits. Thomasos’s art proves to be an idiosyncratic one built on surprises and contradictions. But architecture has social content: Dos Amigos, a much tougher painting of 1993, hangs nearby its all-black patterns represent the armature of a slave ship. In this exhibition, there are several key paintings from the 1990s that reveal the way she repeated the basic structure of a built form, such as a scaffolding or a boat, to the point of abstraction: Rally of 1994 is a wonderful example in which a large canvas is covered in much repeated hatch patterns in different colours. (It was put together by AGO curator Renée van der Avoird, Sally Frater, who is the curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Guelph, and Michelle Jacques, a long-time friend of the artist’s and chief curator at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, which co-organized the show and where it will tour next.)Īfter her start with figurative painting in her student years – she was good enough that she got work sketching street portraits at Canada’s Wonderland – the artist’s abstraction took root soon after she completed graduate school at Yale. ![]() Her achievement is one that emerges from context, which this thorough exhibition provides. Thomasos’s art was a demanding one, stern sometimes, and could feel merely repetitive if a handful of works were viewed casually. Gallery members attend a preview of Just Beyond. It includes everything from an early self-portrait painted in 1984-85 when Thomasos was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto Mississauga to the giant canvases of the 2000s created in her New York studio. If her work has been neglected since then or perhaps, to put it more neutrally, her artistic ascendancy cut short, the AGO retrospective is setting things right. Her career was on the rise when she died suddenly, at only 47, because of an allergic reaction to a medical procedure. The mural remains hidden, but an oversized photograph of Thomasos working on the project introduces visitors to a major retrospective of her semi-abstract architectural paintings.īorn in Trinidad, Thomasos grew up in Toronto before moving to the United States for graduate school, eventually establishing herself in New York. Now the gallery is unearthing Thomasos’s work – albeit not literally. It was created in 2005, seven years before Thomasos’s untimely death in 2012, when the AGO, in the midst of major renovations, commissioned several artists to cover temporary walls. Log In Create Free Accountīuried somewhere inside an interior wall at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, there’s a mural painted by the Trinidadian-Canadian artist Denyse Thomasos.
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