Tiger vs Bear

Animals have populated my work for over 30 years. Perhaps it was the synthesis of Saturday morning cartoons and my experience growing up in the Canadian North that influenced my perceptions. I prefer animals to humans; they have more integrity. They allow me to address relationships in a subverted manner, forcing the viewer to dig deeper if they desire more meaning.

Shell Games

Many of us have a Rolodex of images that we have come across that are emblazoned into our memory. These images are important scenes from our everyday life or even powerful images that call out to us from the ether of our cellular devices (continued . . . )

Prelude (of a Sci-Fi film noir)

Galerie Youn is pleased to present the exhibition “PRELUDE” (Of A Sci-Fi Film Noir) by Spanish artist Hugo Alonso, composed of his recent series of paintings.

This is a second solo exhibition by Spanish Painter Hugo Alonso presented by the Galerie Youn in association with Art Toronto, from October 27-30 at booth C28. The exhibition is on view from October 6 until November 26, 2022, with a Vernissage to be held on Thursday, October 6, 2022, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Ten Hundred Years of Yawns & Dust

“Atop the hills of excess fill, amid the Vooka storm of yawns and dust, wonderers ponder airborne fathoms and scrawls amongst our past us.”– Jiggs

For over a decade, Jay Dart has been developing a series of drawings featuring his alter ego, Jiggs, and a cast of wanderers in the whimsical mindscape known as Yawnder through which a narrative continues to evolve about the mystical nature of inspiration, the quest for innovative creation, and the dissemination of ideas. Within this conceptually layered world, Dart explores themes of identity, innocence lost/recovered, isolation, ecology, and interconnection in modern society.

The look says it all

The look says it all is a series of paintings that explores the act of looking, charting the differences between “looking at” and “looking in.” The conflict of being apart from something and a part of something has been intensified by the isolation of recent years and the need for intimacy that pervades our digitally driven lives. The paintings address this conflict and face the viewer with both feelings of escape and solace.

Baroque for days, darling

My recent work explores the cultural and artistic representations of gender through gay male subjectivity. As a portrait artist, I figured what better place to start than social media and painting gay male selfies. I was fascinated as to how gay men chose to represent themselves to a wider audience…

Breathe

The exhibition BREATHE brings together two series of photographs created during two phases of the pandemic: lockdown (BLOOM), and the opening of the borders (EXHALE).

Ye

The phrase “ye” comes from old English and has poetic and religious connotations. It’s an unusual word with a certain sense of other worldliness or strangeness. It effectively means you, but in the plural sense. It’s me looking at you or ye. Or even you looking at me or others.

Tulipmania

In Tulipmania, I re-examine 17th-century Flemish floral still life painting. I am drawn to this genre of painting for its inherent beauty and symbolism: flowers representing the life cycle, accoutrements pointing to scarcity, drama, the inevitability of death. For me, within each painting is contained a rich narrative that broaches questions from the mundane to the existential.

Mysterious Barricades

Brand new works from Vancouver artist Paul Morstad.

Urban Memories

Inspired by the photorealism movement, Jude Castel makes an original yet complex use of the blue ballpoint pen…

The Lexicon of Blurry Lines

Sébastien Gaudette’s artistic practice revolves around the theme of paper, exploring its relationship to sculpture through the study of gesture…

Lost Property Office

Window film screening of the stop-motion film by Daniel Agdag.

The Sun Still Sets

The Sun Still Sets is a silent video of the sun setting on the skyline of Bangkok…

Contraband

Ian Healy’s depiction of the contemporary figure navigates a precarious line where meaning meets form. His works use a variety of mediums – pastels, oil paint, or watercolour – often produced in quick bursts to portray a sense of urgency and tension ...

Recent Works

With this new series of watercolours, Ron Loranger answers a painterly question that occupied his practice for quite a while: How do you move your work from the subjective to the figurative? …

Heavy Lines

Lucas Biagini is a Toronto-based abstract painter. His curiosity for materials leads him to combine colour, line and process to create visually dynamic and sculptural abstract paintings…

Heads

After spending the last two years working on black and white drawing, Yannick Chayer has chosen, for this exhibition, to present six works where colour is brought to the forefront.

Cronos

Cronos is a series of paintings on the subject of time, space and memory. In this series, the artist revisits real and imaginary places that have marked him. The exhibition features a dozen oil paintings made in 2020.

Chaste

Chaste is a series born out of necessity during the restrictive times of COVID-19. Choosing not to lose her mind, she spent many cold nights alone with the stars in barren cityscapes and skyscapes as people were encouraged to stay home and the skies were unencumbered. As restrictions were eased and social distancing required, solitary or distanced individuals were added to the scenes.

For the Love of Gold

The incorruptibility of gold, unique in all of nature, has made it the most precious metal on earth.

Driving people mad with its purity and beauty, gold has fascinated, captivated and motivated individuals, nation states and empires throughout history.

For the Love of Gold presents the artist’s newest paintings, which question the universal notions of value, attraction and dependency.

unfinished studies of anonymous women

Historically majority female figure paintings in art have been criticized as being objectified through male perspectives. For example, the male gaze, in feminist theory, is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer…

A Spoonful of Sugar

This summer, we will be presenting new works from Toronto-based artist Bernice Lum.

Everything is Fleeting

Energy dispersal and change comprise the impetus for this body of work. Each piece references a volcanic explosion or amalgamation of explosions to recall disruption, destruction, and eventual renewal. The flowers lend a patina of beauty and ease to a process that is jarring, disorienting, and happening constantly — whether or not we are paying attention.

In Bloom

In my series entitled In Bloom, I recontextualize art historical still life tropes of late 17th- and early 18th-century Flemish floral painting within a personal and contemporary aesthetic paradigm in an effort to reinvigorate interest in the role of beauty and fragility in the mundane.

La Planète KRAG

Planet KRAG is a series of paintings made by Guillaume Klootier in 2018-2019.

Planet KRAG is a series about the rout and anger of a generation of men and boys torn between nostalgia and the shame of an outdated patriarchy. Uncertain of the future and confronted with the ambiguity of their new roles, they sometimes doubt their usefulness. Nevertheless, they carry the hope of a better future.

Altered States

Jessica Sarrazin is an interdisciplinary artist. For this exhibition, Altered States, she has photographed outdoor views, such as landscapes glimpsed from train windows or photos of the night sky.

She uses slightly flawed or unresolved photographs which she alters with hand sewing. By turns, these alterations appear to impose a tenuous order, suggest movement, or add an ethereal quality to the photograph. Her images are cinematic in their framing and have a quiet and intense sense of drama.

‘Aloft’

I have been thinking about the personal and the symbolic in the creation of this new series.

The narrative basis for each piece is born from familial stories of rootless existence, of explicit and implicit forced migration and the universal desire to establish roots, however tenuous.

I am seeking to examine this narrative through the creation of works that are paradoxically anchored by the weight of a symbolic history and desire for place, yet stand in preparation for flight.

To be aloft suggests to be high up, drifting, floating in an effortless fashion. It also connotes a loss of control, a theme to which I return often.

Barriers

“Barriers” depicts the macrocosm of conflict through expository thought and symbolic imagery. The images probe at the divergence of modes in which conflict manifests itself; internal and external. Both realms, though distinct, are fundamentally entangled within an elemental context where they respond to each other. Fire and smoke are motifs underscored in their own respective sets of images to individually express discord, ultimately coupling them together.

Time lost, time found

Where there’s an image, there’s a story. These stories are not necessarily lineal, but can allude as much to memories of the future as to the past.