Pat O'Hara: Gestures

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Pat O'Hara, "Center," 2019

acrylic on panel, 48" X 48"

Pat O'Hara: Gestures 

Upper Gallery Opening Reception: Saturday September 14, 2-4 pm artist in attendance.

Gestures explores the progression of established abstract painter Pat O'Hara's lyrical style and her career-spanning experimentation with gesture and mark-making, with a particular focus on the techniques developed over past 5 years. Controlled and restrained or loose and sweeping, O'Hara's application of paint lends graphic form to the definition of "gesture" as visual communication; an intentional movement as a means of expression.

O'Hara's eye for colour marries muted, subtle grounds with bold saturated accents to create unorthodox colour stories, embracing chance and happenstance as it occurs within her varied palette. The artist's compositions arrange fragments of sinuous structures drawn from her most recent Serpentine works with elements of her highly successful Linearity series. O'Hara's profusions of arcing curves, string-painted drips, and repetitive broken-line painting adopt a multi-directional momentum to erupt outwards beyond the confines of pictorial space.

These dual bodies of exploratory movement hint at a deconstructive force within O'Hara's practice. Her instinctual return to the challenge of each gesture becomes reenacted bodily, endlessly modulated, and compulsively exercised in search of an elusive quality within the act, the gesture, of painting.

Pat O'Hara is an established abstract painter based in Vancouver. Pat O'Hara was born in Burns Lake, British Columbia and studied art at the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr College of Art and Design where she graduated with the Merit Award for painting in 1981. Her process of art-making over the past 30 years has included a variety of experimental techniques using paint-dipped strings to pull paint across two-dimensional surfaces, as well as cutting, layering, collage and weaving canvas. O’Hara’s work can be found in private and public collections all across Canada including Air Canada, Pan Pacific Hotel in Vancouver, Scotiabank, Citibank, and Polygon Homes. O’Hara continues to live and work out of her home and studio in Vancouver, Canada.