Oakville Galleries will open their latest exhibition this weekend, including an opening reception this Sunday, October 2 at Centennial Square and in Gairloch Gardens.
Called Lay Figure, the solo exhibition of work is by Portland, Maine-based artist Sascha Braunig (born Qualicum Beach, BC, Canada, 1983). According to the Galleries, the exhibit is perfectly timed for the fall season.
"Exercises in colour, form, and illusion, Braunig’s works cite an artistic lineage that stretches from the Pictures Generation through to the Chicago Imagists and horror-movie practical effects," according to a show description.
"Her sometimes barbed, tubular, netted, or neon-lit forms speak of many of the tensions of the current moment, such as being a subject within the grid of digital or gender systems."
For her first solo exhibition at a museum in Canada, the artist "brings together new and recent paintings and drawings that are based on the compositional motif of figures engaged in conflict with a dress-like structure. These works use material qualities to analogize an immaterial idea: the feeling of struggling with a system more powerful than you, in which you are also deeply entangled."
Lay Figure will celebrate its opening this Sunday with a reception from 2-5 p.m. at Centennial Square (from 2-3:30 PM) and in Gairloch Gardens (3:30-5 p.m.). All are welcome and refreshments will be served. Remarks will be made at approximately 3:45 p.m. in Gairloch Gardens.
Also included in the exhibition is a display of the three-dimensional models she builds and uses as visual aids in the making of each large painting. Because of this observational painting practice, Braunig sees her work as being linked to the academic nineteenth-century painter’s use of the "lay figure," a jointed doll, not quite to-scale, that artists used as a stand-in for a live model in the studio.
The title of the show, Lay Figure, refers to this historical practice, but the artist extends its meaning to the schematic wiry figure that recurs in her recent work. Braunig imagines the lay figure coming into its own life, pushing against a system in which it is also embedded and resisting its status as the inanimate muse in patriarchal painting’s history.
Braunig received significant attention and acclaim for her exhibition after its recent show in New York City. Featuring loans from private collections across the United States, Europe, and Asia, Braunig’s exhibition at Oakville Galleries "presents a highly evocative suite of works that demonstrate the artist's singular vision and talent."
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication of new writing on the work of Sascha Braunig, published by Oakville Galleries in partnership with Triangle Books, Belgium. Contributors include curator Frances Loeffler and artist Lucy Kim.
Oakville Galleries say this exhibition and forthcoming publication "has been generously supported by Mark and Judy Bednar." The Galleries also "gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario and the Corporation of the Town of Oakville, along with our many individual, corporate and foundation partners."
The exhibition is running from now to December 30, 2022.
More information about the show can be found on the Oakville Galleries website.