Shelley Adler and Joe Fleming | On the back of a Cartoon Coaster

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Left: Shelley Adler, "Blush", 2022 Right: Joe Fleming, "Netflix", 2022

Courtesy of the Gallery.

Opening Reception Saturday, October 15th from 2 to 5 pm. Both Artists in Attendance.

Shelley Adler - Toronto based artist, Shelley Adler’s paintings are commanding in their painterly exuberance and stunning range of color. Using fragments of contemporary life, Adler’s psychological portraits explore gender and identity, creating a balance between interior and exterior worlds. From early cave painting to the Mona Lisa and Andy Warhol portraiture is a formidable artistic tradition. Shelley Adler’s paintings of people’s faces are not portraits in the strict sense of the word in that portraits are formulated primarily as likenesses of the sitter. In Adler’s painting, the face is a springboard to a luminous and freeform tableau. They are less about the sitter than the internal processes of the artist and her intense curiosity about people, about the ways of looking, and about the act of painting. These considerations are delicately balanced to reflect a deep humanism. With generous brushstrokes and vibrant planes of light, Adler forms the face into an elemental and iconic essence. Each painting is endowed with a particular, individual energy through color and composition. Color and its link to emotion is a primary concern and although Adler employs eccentric, non-naturalistic color, the faces have a very real quality. Like David Hockney, Adler often paints people she knows. For Hockney, capturing a subject’s likeness, and especially his or her personality, can only be properly done with the human touch, or as he says, “it has to be directed through my heart to my eye to my hand.”

Joe Fleming - has exhibited internationally for over 18 years with solo exhibitions in Singapore, Toronto, Calgary and New York City. He has lectured at universities in Canada, the United States and South East Asia since 1993. His paintings are included in many public and private collections such as: BMO Financial Group, Trimark Mutual Funds, Honeywell Bull, Prince Waterhouse Coopers (Malaysia), HSBC Bank, A.T. Tolley Collection, Australian High Commission, Canadian High Commission (Kuala Lumpur), the Art Gallery of Edmonton, the Museum of Civilization (Hull, Quebec) and the Holocaust Museum (LA). Fleming has exhibited in several international art fairs: Art Stage (Singapore), FIAC (Paris), Arte Cologne (Germany), Scope (New York and Miami), Papier (Montreal) and TIAF (Toronto). He has received recognition for his work in Carte Blanche 2: Painting – a survey of new Canadian painting (The Magenta Foundation), 60 Painters in Canada, The Artist’s Studio (by Joseph Hartman), Imago Mundi, Design Lines Magazine, Azure Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Now Magazine, CBC, Chelsea Now and The Wall Street Journal Magazine. Joe Fleming lives and works in Toronto, Canada.