The recent work of Wanda Koop, one of Canada’s leading artists, is showcased at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg. Included in the show are Reflect: Sea Foam Green, Opera Pink, 2018, (detail), above; and below, from left, UNSEEN SEEN: Glowing—River, 2018; Scandinavia Trees #1, 2020; and Dreamline: River, 2018.
Wanda Koop – Lightworks
@ The McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, until November 20.
Fans of Canadian art need no introduction to Wanda Koop.
One of Canada’s leading painters, her works have appeared in galleries in Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, New York and Houston.
Her career spans four decades and she continues to experiment.
Based in Winnipeg, Koop has created a body of work that attests to her astute observations of contemporary life, responding to such issues as climate change, Indigenous land rights, and the digital media environment in which we are immersed, as well as the transcendent beauty of the natural world.As the gallery material notes:
“Koop’s work has engaged with abstraction since her earliest days, as she stripped away inessential detail to create strikingly pared down compositions and collisions of colour. In her more recent paintings, though, she explores colour and light as subjects in themselves, masterfully engineering her canvases through the application of dozens of layers of deftly controlled pigment. The resulting surfaces seem to glow from within, suggesting euphoric states of vision.
“Through the arrangement of these recent works into an ensemble of rare beauty, Koop will bring us realms of light as never before, and a rare glimpse into her deepest sources of inspiration. In addition to her paintings on canvas, the exhibition will also include a number of her new Light Sticks—a suite of long, thin shaped works that bear strips of intense colour and patterning, arranged sculpturally against the wall—a breakthrough into the third dimension.”
Wanda Koop – Lightworks continues until Nov. 22.
