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Conceived in Colour – Barry Allikas, Caroline Hart, Jennifer Lefort, Susannah Phillips – Invited Curator: Leopold Plotek

Vernissage: Thursday February 2nd at 6 pm
Exhibition: February 3 to 25
Talk: Thursday February 9 at 7 pm

As part of our Invited Curator Program, the McClure Gallery is pleased to feature Leopold Plotek’s exhibition Conceived in Colour, which includes the work of artists Barry Allikas, Caroline Hart, Jennifer Lefort, and Susannah Phillips. Conceived in Colour presents four completely different ways of imagining painting in colour. This exhibition is a clash of harmonies – the reserved contrasted with the exuberant, fluid with formal, planned with improvised. It is contemporary painting, live and direct!

In Leopold Plotek’s words: “Despite the proliferation of books and courses on colour, comprising popular science, cultural history, fashion journalism, decorating manuals, self-healing primers, serious art-history and God knows what else, the painter’s job of dealing with colour never seems to become one bit easier. Or perhaps it just appears that way to one, like myself, for whom colour has always been fraught. Apart from the bit of ‘theory’ about the principles of colour-contrast, which can be learned by a quick fifth-grader in an hour, it looks as if just about everything that’s useful has to be gained by experience (I mean both of painting and looking). It’s remarkable that when colour is striking enough in someone’s work to merit attention, it’s mostly a matter of the nuances of individual style, a kind of ‘thinking-in-colour’ which appears to be innate.

The four painters whose work I propose for your delectation stand in marked contrast to each other, except in their relation to colour, which is immanent and germinal. They also show how the strength of colour in modernism and its successors, while not always dominant, has survived and prospered.”

Barry Allikas lives and works in Montreal, and has exhibited across Canada, as well as internationally. His work is in many important collections, including the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec, Hydro-Québec, Caisse de Dépôt and Banque National.

Caroline Lindsay Hart lives and works in Montreal. She holds a degree in Studio Arts from Concordia University where she has been an adjunct professor of painting and drawing for over a decade. Her work has been exhibited in Montreal, London, Florence, and, most recently at Galerie Robert Poulin in 2015.

Jennifer Lefort lives and works in Gatineau. In recent years she has exhibited her work in Canada and internationally, for instance, with the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides and the Galerie UQO in Gatineau for which she was awarded the Prix du CALQ-Œuvre de l’année.

Susannah Phillips lives and works in New York City. She attended The Slade School of Fine Art and lived in Montreal for many years. She is represented by Lori Bookstein, NYC and was awarded the Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation residency 2014 and 2017.

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