Sylvia Tait: Yesterday And Today
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Bau-Xi Gallery Vancouver 3045 Granville St, Vancouver, British Columbia V6H 3J9
Sylvia Tait, "Passacaglia - Street Talk," 2021
detail acrylic on archival paper, 29.5" X 41"
Yesterday and Today, a new exhibition by acclaimed artist Sylvia Tait, celebrates the West Coast modernist's storied career and will feature early black and white mixed-media drawings from the artist's personal archives alongside new canvas and paper works.
Engaging with her past and present practice, Tait recalling the artistic momentum and social upheaval of the 60s and 70s to trace parallels to our current times. Moved by the same formalist concerns and aesthetic principals that have defined her artistic signature, Tait re-interprets the monochromatic palette to explore new subtleties of tonal variation in dialogue with her longtime interest in the evocative power of colour block abstraction.
Tait's latest paintings swell with the fresh interplay of textual elements, recurring forms, gestural mark-making and textured surfaces. Deftly wielding influences and techniques collected and re-discovered from her expansive body of work, Yesterday and Today chronicles the artist's self-reflexive instinct and her return time and again to the act of reinvention and showcases a singular painter at the very height of her power.
Sylvia Tait is an established Canadian painter who studied for four years at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts under Arthur Lismer, Jacques de Tonnancoeur, and Eldon Grier.
She received three scholarships, Top Student Award and Honour Diploma. Since the 1950s she has exhibited across Canada, Mexico, and Ecuador in solo and group shows. Sylvia Tait has been represented by the Bau-Xi Gallery since 1977. Her paintings are in corporate and public collections in Europe, USA, Canada, South America and Asia. Selected collections include Musée de l'Art Contemporaine, Quebec; Vancouver Art Gallery, BC; Winnipeg Art Gallery, Manitoba; the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; the West Vancouver Museum, the Burnaby Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank. Sylvia Tait recently won the competition for the new Aquatic Center in West Vancouver, BC. "AquaScapes" is an art piece of enormous proportions.