a group exhibition featuring Graham Gillmore, James Nye, Alex McLeod, Frank Torng, Angela Grossmann, Ben van Netten, Trevor Guthrie, Noah Becker, and Attila Richard Lukacs While a mere six longitudinal degrees separate Toronto from Vancouver, the distance between the art worlds of Eastern and Western Canada is vast. Bringing ten Canadian artists to Claire Oliver Gallery, guest curator Noah Becker seeks not only to bridge the gap between these two important Canadian art scenes but also to awaken the sometimes nearsighted New York... Read more

a group exhibition featuring Graham Gillmore, James Nye, Alex McLeod, Frank Torng, Angela Grossmann, Ben van Netten, Trevor Guthrie, Noah Becker, and Attila Richard Lukacs

While a mere six longitudinal degrees separate Toronto from Vancouver, the distance between the art worlds of Eastern and Western Canada is vast. Bringing ten Canadian artists to Claire Oliver Gallery, guest curator Noah Becker seeks not only to bridge the gap between these two important Canadian art scenes but also to awaken the sometimes nearsighted New York audience to the abundance of artistic talent from our northern neighbor.

A melting pot of international cross-cultural pollination, New York City makes the perfect venue for the increasingly international focus of these emerging Canadian artists. Without a sufficient tradition to emulate, Attila Richard Lukacs, Angela Grossmann, and Graham Gillmore have laid their own foundation in Vancouver that supports and inspires a new generation of talent. Lukacs is known for his expressive paintings of raw, edgy male figures which blur the line between homo-eroticism and aggressive physical competition; he has always chosen subjects that allow him to critique from the outside. Just as Bacon painted the male body at that point where it exploded into schizophrenia, so too Lukacs paints the male body in all its hysteria. Grossman makes complex collages, combining her own painting and drawing with layers of obsessively collected old photographs. The resulting works are intense psychological portraits, slightly jarring and disturbing in their ability to leave the viewer with the feeling he has violated some trust with his gaze. Gillmore transcribes excerpts from musical lyrics, literature, tabloids, or aphorisms into whimsical speech bubbles, graphically housing individual letters like children’s blocks as they fracture the language and offer witty social commentary emancipated from its original context.