Wanda Koop: Lightworks

Wanda Koop is one of Canada’s leading painters, her works appearing in the galleries of Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, New York and Houston. Though she has had a more than forty-year career as an artist, we are catching Koop in a late-career moment of glory, as she continues her bold path of experimentation. Based in Winnipeg, she has created a body of work that attests to her astute observations of contemporary life, responding to such issues as climate change, Indigenous land rights, and the digital media environment in which we are immersed, as well as the transcendent beauty of the natural world.

Koop’s work has engaged with abstraction since her earliest days, as she stripped away inessential detail to create strikingly pared down compositions and collisions of colour. In her more recent paintings, though, she explores colour and light as subjects in themselves, masterfully engineering her canvases through the application of dozens of layers of deftly controlled pigment. The resulting surfaces seem to glow from within, suggesting euphoric states of vision.

Through the arrangement of these recent works into an ensemble of rare beauty, Koop will bring us realms of light as never before, and a rare glimpse into her deepest sources of inspiration. In addition to her paintings on canvas, the exhibition will also include a number of her new Light Sticks—a suite of long, thin shaped works that bear strips of intense colour and patterning, arranged sculpturally against the wall—a breakthrough into the third dimension.