KWT contemporary: Alex D'Arcy: "Nocturnes"

KWT contemporary is pleased to welcome Alex D'Arcy back to Toronto, and to her first solo exhibition with the gallery, following completion of her graduate studies at Central St. Martin's School for Art in London, UK. This new suite of paintings represents a visual synthesis of her experiences in the built urban environments of the old and new worlds of London and Toronto. While developing this body of work, D'Arcy immersed herself in Chopin's piano sonatas, which informed the rhythm, movement and colour sequences of the paintings themselves. The result is an exhibition of oils on canvas which is, in totality, cooly elegant, restrained, and yet vibrantly alive.

Regarding her latest work, D'Arcy states: "Chopin's Nocturnes are melancholic, elegiac demonstrations between form and mood. Counterpoint to create tension, a technique for Chopin, evokes my own tandem interests as a painter. As with the music, weaving through the compositional structure of the paintings are broken chords that animate the space around them. Many of the works in this exhibition begin from the formal structure of optical relations, or how subtle variations in color will strive to become as different from each other as possible when put side by side. The seemingly neutral ground in the work becomes the support, an animated space, an active context that holds and dissembles, conceals and reveals. These relationships, among the individual colours and in relation to the space that holds them, can foster mood or provoke emotional experience."

Here is a virtual tour of the current exhibition, "Nocturnes", which closes on Jan 7, 2012. Please note that we are open by appointment only from Dec. 22 to Jan. 7.