Frédérique Ulman-Gagné – Les Choses

Vernissage: Thursday April 27 at 6 pm
Exhibition: April 28 to May 20, 2017
Artist’s Talk: Thursday May 4 at 7 pm

The McClure Gallery is pleased to feature the recent work of Frédérique Ulman-Gagné. For the exhibition LES CHOSES, the gallery will be taken over by large-scale paintings that open up a dialogue with the exhibition. LES CHOSES will be comprised of visual scenes without characters and stories. Instead, the scenes focus on the vitality of seemingly endless colours and abstract forms.

Her current research is focused on the specificity of sites, leading her work to go beyond the limits of the rectangular canvas. The things that surround Ulman-Gagné’s paintings reappear in them as debris and fragments removed from their context and presented without hierarchy: colour tests, studio objects, household objects, etc. In the process of gradually becoming installations, her works start to take over the exhibition space by reaching up to the ceiling so as to extend beyond it. The installation then becomes the image of a generalized exasperation.

Frédérique Ulman-Gagné uses abstraction in peculiar compositions: at once excessive and minimal in order to upset the order of things. In the process, she alters our cozy relationship to the constructed object and to the “real”. Each of the paintings becomes a site for tragedy to play itself out, even as it is outmaneuvered by the simplicity of patterns. Painting as such becomes reconfigured as a fusion with the actual space to the point of no longer being distinguishable from it.

FRÉDÉRIQUE ULMAN-GAGNÉ lives and works in Montreal. She obtained a BFA from Concordia University in 2007 and a Master degree from UQAM in 2010. She has had various solo exhibitions in Canada since 2008 and participated in various group shows. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Her work is in private and public collections, among them the cities of Laval and Longueuil. She is represented by Galerie Dominique Bouffard in Montreal.

Les Choses – Frédérique Ulman-Gagné

6 pages (7 colour reproductions)
french / english
ISBN : 978 –1-926492-14-8
McClure Gallery, 2017
available: McClure Gallery
$ 5