Diaz Contemporary is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works on paper by Karin Davie. This will be the artist’s first solo show with the gallery and in Toronto. Davie, a leading contemporary abstract painter, introduces two new series of gouache drawings, Liquid Life and Shadow Days. Both series continue Davie’s exploration of abstraction, perception and process.
Karin Davie is best known for her sensual ‘stripe’ abstractions and hyperbolic compositions. Her contemporary practice has been viewed in context with the ideas of painting-as-performance from 1950s Abstract Expressionism and the optical endeavours of 1960s Op Art. Yet Davie departs from these formalist and largely masculine painting traditions, rejecting the notion of a pure abstraction for a more referential and representational approach. Davie utilizes the language of abstraction as suggestive curvature and energetic forms to create unexpectedly psychologically charged images.
While earlier movements in abstraction have often emphasized the painted surface, Davie’s more recent works evoke great depth and psychic space. Backgrounds of neon-like colours simultaneously hide and reveal themselves amidst a field of velvety black brushstrokes in Shadow Days, conjuring nuances of an ominous urban environment at night. These dense compositions tempt the viewer to wonder what exists behind and beyond. The drawings of Liquid Life consist of layers of overlapping and undulating brushstrokes that graduate in colour around the edges of subtly shaped paper. The images are strangely reminiscent of internal, visceral spaces, as well as viscous fluids or supernatural waves of energy. Davie’s forms hover between the physical and metaphysical, push the boundaries of the paper’s edge and invite the viewer to imagine their performative creation
Karin Davie was born in Toronto and is currently based in New York, NY and Seattle, WA. She holds a BFA from Queens University in Kingston, ON and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI. Davie has an extensive exhibition history, including solo shows at Mary Boone Gallery in New York, NY, SITE Santa Fe, NM, Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, ON, Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT, the Project Space at MOMA, NY, White Cube in London, UK, and Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2006, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery presented a major career retrospective of Davie’s paintings, sculptures and drawings. Her work is held in many public and private collections including: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Seattle Art Museum, the Oppenheimer Collection at the Nerman Museum in Kansas City, MO, the Rubbell Family Collection in Miami, FL, the Maramotti Museum in Reggio Emilia, Italy, the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach, FL, the Marx Collection in Germany and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.
  
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