November 30 - December 12, 2016 - Gurevich Fine Art escaped the cold and headed south to explore one of the biggest art events of the year in the Art Basel Miami heat. Take a look!
Gurevich Fine Art welcomes Mitchell Fenton
Gurevich Fine Art is pleased to announce the addition of Mitchell Fenton to our artist roster.
Fenton’s enthusiasm and love for the outdoors underlies the brushstrokes in his paintings of breathtaking Canadian landscapes, particularly those of the Canadian Rockies and much of the country’s west. Fenton paints plein air—meaning “in open air”—with oil on small wood panels. His portable set-up enables him to hike into remote areas like Lake O'Hara. This process allows him to follow in the proverbial footsteps of great painters that came before him such as John Singer Sargent, J.E.H. MacDonald, and Lawren Harris.
The trails around Lake O’Hara’s three intersecting valleys are popular among artists and hikers alike; they have been tended and maintained for more than a century. Of his venture into these sublime realms of nature, Fenton says: “It is not the destination, but the journey that is more important.” For Fenton, and as his works may demonstrate, inspiriting is the anticipation of stopping to begin a composition; the small details of the lichen and wildflowers; cropped abstract patterns of rocks meeting a lake; or the perfect alignment of a grand vista. He seeks authenticity in environment. Back in the studio, some panels are chosen and worked up into larger canvasses. His works are intended to help us acknowledge and understand our connection with the land and the ways in which it shapes our history, our culture, and our livelihoods.
Fenton was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1962. He graduated from Ontario College of Art with a degree in the interdisciplinary field of Experimental Arts, splitting his time between sculpture and painting. After graduating, he completed two major public art sculptures in Toronto, Ontario, both for Artscape. For the last 16 years, the now Ontario-based Fenton has devoted his time to painting.
You can see some of Fenton’s work on display at Gurevich Fine Art.
Gurevich Fine Art Welcomes Neil Peter Dyck.
Gurevich Fine Art is pleased to announce the addition of talented West Coast-based artist Neil Peter Dyck to our artist roster.
Through the melding of paint and collage, Dyck’s ethereal, fragmented compositions are the result of reducing, enhancing and concealing abstract forms, a multi-layered process that simultaneously exposes an expressive freedom and calculated restraint. The juxtaposition of vast, flat prairies against the ancient rocky peaks of the Canadian west coast find a place on painted wood panels, leaving the viewer traveling between the two.
Dyck has exhibited across Canada, including in the Toronto International Art Fair. He was awarded the Heinz Jordan Prize in Painting in both 2004 and 2005 and the Artist in Residence in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories in 2016. His work is appreciated worldwide, featuring in collections across Canada, Turkey, Switzerland and in The Official Residence of the Consul General in Shanghai.
Gurevich Fine Art welcomes Gabrielle Funk to artist roster
Gurevich Fine Art welcomes exceptional Winnipeg visual artist and muralist Gabrielle Funk. Her paintings and pointillist drawings are an impressive balance of refinement and gentle tension, and at only 25 years old, her artistic talent extends well beyond her years.
Funk’s current work grapples with the complex subtleties of femininity: comparing, contrasting or combining vulnerable images of women’s bodies with those of culturally significant animals. This work carefully and critically addresses the physical and psychological dynamics of wild and domesticated beings and the power hierarchies that exist amongst them.
Funk works primarily in two dimensional format using combinations of ink and acrylic to render densely detailed characters imbedded in sparse, abstract environments. Her realist portraits walk the line between awkward and graceful, familiar and foreign. Funk aims to beckon viewers into a world laced with quiet tension and subtle admission. She seeks to find and represent both vulnerability and authenticity using subject matter that is as hostile and wild as it is familiar.
Funk’s commissioned murals depicting intriguing animal figures adorn the walls of several Winnipeg buildings.
“Funk’s attention to detail and skill as an artist is exceptionally impressive. Her provocative yet exquisitely rendered paintings and drawings will appeal to our collectors who are seeking a challenge, and we are excited to welcome her to the GFA artist roster.”
You can see some of Funk’s work on display at Gurevich Fine Art.
Diana Thorneycroft wins 2016 Manitoba Arts Award of Distinction
Diana Thorneycroft is the 2016 Manitoba Arts Award of Distinction recipient. The recognition comes with $30,000 for the artist, and is the Manitoba Arts Council’s award for the highest level of excellence and long-term achievements of an artist in Manitoba.
Known for making art that hovers on the edge of public acceptance, Thorneycroft has pursued topics that often challenged her viewing audience. She arrived on the national art scene in the early 1990s with her highly charged black and white self-portraits photographs that explored issues around sexual identity and the body in pain. In 1999 her installation Monstrance, which involved the corpses of rabbits, became a flashpoint for conversations around government funding. From 2005-2015 Thorneycroft’s interest in Canadian identity emerged as she completed four different bodies of work that investigated and subverted notions of “Canadian-ness”.
Read the full announcement on the Manitoba Arts Council website here. Congratulations, Diana!
Miami 2015
Last month, GFA owner Howard Gurevich travelled to Miami, Florida to check out some of the art fairs! We've put together a quick look at some of the art we saw during our visit to ART WEEK. We noticed some interesting trends including the rise of representational art and, of course, the influence of mid century modern in both art and design. We saw very little conceptual work even at the fairs that promoted it. Over the course of our visit, we attended 9 fairs and culled these images from over 1000 photos!
