Towards is pleased to present Trust Your Brush, a group exhibition featuring the work of Anne Neukamp, Beth Letain, Manuel Kirsch, Marlene Zoë Burz and Renaud Regnery.
The artists included in Trust Your Brush share an interest in analyzing existing structures, and the ways in which they can be disassembled. Using the grid as a point of departure, the work within the exhibition explores themes of repetition, technology, scarcity, and the human body.
The first piece the viewer is confronted with upon entering the gallery is Marlene Zoë Burz’s Sketch (wall Toronto), 2018, a large scale gouache drawing on mylar. Referencing both architecture, as well as the human body, the piece wraps around corners and takes on an almost skeletal-like support of the space.
Renaud Regnery’s Faux Title Paintings explore human desire and the economic and technological developments that led to the mass production of consumer goods. Created using wallpaper from the 1930’s, the patterns were originally meant to provide an attractive and cost-effective way for individuals to decorate their home during a severe worldwide economic depression. Re-purposed here, the grids appear slightly misaligned – the slippages in between the “tiles” highlight the tension between surface, meaning, and material.
Anne Neukamp’s work hovers somewhere between the border of abstraction and representation. Images and iconography are culled from a variety of sources, removed from their context, and then re-purposed to create something wholly new. Oscillating back and forth between the familiar and the foreign, as well as the digital and the physical – space gets flattened within her work, and the images and objects within these compositions fluctuate in an endless loop where meaning is continually reinventing itself.
Manuel Kirsch’s large scale canvases explore the aesthetics of everyday objects. Using strategies of sampling, repetition, scale, and materiality, he examines the seemingly mundane patterns found on some of the most common household goods and expands them– turning them from something quite common-place to something altogether extraordinary.
In the back space, there are three watercolour drawings by Beth Letain. Known primarily for her large scale, abstract paintings, these smaller studies share a spatial awareness and interplay between surface and edge, as well as an acute understanding of colour and form.
