Dana Claxton, “Let the Poem Limp,” 2021
copperplate etching, overall 21.25″ x 17.1″ (courtesy the Art Gallery of Ontario)
The Art Gallery of Ontario purchased 12 works at Art Toronto this year – almost all of them by artists with ties to Western Canada.
The gallery’s department of arts of global Africa and the diaspora purchased two paintings by Emmanuel Osahor, a Nigerian-born artist who did his undergraduate degree at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Osahor recently completed his Master’s of fine arts at the University of Guelph, and won the $30,000 Joseph Plaskett postgraduate award for painting.
In an article on the AGO’s website, curator Julie Crooks says Osahor’s “paintings of lush gardens foreground notions of beauty, light and refuge.”
His paintings, I Have Been Thinking of my Father’s Garden and I Have Been Thinking of my Mother’s Garden, are the first of his works to be added to the AGO’s collection.
1 of 2
Emmanuel Osahor, “I Have Been Thinking of my Father’s Garden,” 2021
oil on unstretched canvas, 96″ x 68″ (courtesy the Art Gallery of Ontario)
2 of 2
Emmanuel Osahor, “I Have Been Thinking of my Mother’s Garden,” 2021
oil on unstretched canvas, 96″ x 68″ (courtesy the Art Gallery of Ontario)
The modern and contemporary art department acquired two works by Vancouver-based, Hong Kong-born artist Howie Tsui (Tsui Ho Yan / 徐浩恩), including a lenticular lightbox called Parallax Neon (Peach Blossom Island) and a drawing titled White Camel Mountain (scoundrelism).
“Expressing a kind of diasporic experience grounded in self-organization, Tsui’s animation, drawing and installation practice references the tradition of martial arts fiction as a metaphor for anarchic imagination,” says curator Xiaoyu Weng in the same article.
The prints and drawings department purchased a portfolio with six copperplate etchings and one giclee print from the not-for-profit 85-5 Visual Arts Foundation. The portfolio’s sale supports emerging artists in B.C. This year’s edition includes work by seven artists, including B.C.-based Dana Claxton, Angela Grossmann, Attila Richard Lukacs and Derek Root.
These are the first works by Claxton, Grossman and Root to enter the prints and drawings collection.
Source: Art Gallery of Ontario