View of Ernestine Tahedl’s new installation in Toronto with Tahedl’s shadow across glass (photo courtesy of the artist)
Ernestine Tahedl in Toronto
Glass artist and painter Ernestine Tahedl’s new installation, Glorification II, is scheduled to be unveiled this month in Toronto.
Working with a glass technician in Austria, Tahedl has assembled more than 4,000 pieces of vividly hued glass to create a massive coloured window — 22 by 25 feet in total — for one exterior wall of the city’s new Salvation Army Sanctuary, located at 7 Eglington Avenue.
“Tahedl concedes that Glorification II may be her last major glass commission. If so, she leaves a profound legacy,” says Canadian art writer Kate Cino in Art Openings.
“She has excelled in an exacting art form changed little in 500 years. The medium of stained glass has greatly benefitted from the leadership, expertise and imagination of an extraordinary artisan.”
Tahedl, 83, holds a master’s degree in graphic art from the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts. She worked with her father, Heinrich Tahedl, on stained glass commissions in Vienna before moving to Edmonton, Alta., in 1963. She is represented in Canada by Bugera Matheson Gallery in Edmonton, as well as Madrona Gallery in Victoria, B.C., and her work is found in public, corporate and private collections around the world, including Austria, France, Japan, the United States and Switzerland.
Sami Tsang, “Emerging Woman,” detail, 2023, ceramic, engobe, glaze, shell chip, chain, resin (courtesy of the artist and Cooper Cole)
Kelowna Group Show “Highlights Transformative Spaces”
Seven contemporary Canadian artists — Wally Dion, Wanda Lock, Zachari Logan, Amanda McCavour, Samuel Roy-Bois, Andreas Rutkauskas and Sami Tsang — are featured in Significant Forms, a new exhibition of installation-based work on view now through June 9 at Kelowna Art Gallery.
“Significant Forms highlights the transformative spaces that artists create,” says the exhibition's curator Christine May. “These selected works portray both real and imagined sites and explore how a specific time and place can indelibly mark our lives.”
Roy-Bois's monumental The Garden is the first installation in the show, an interactive work made from lumber, drywall and metal fastenings. Visitors are encouraged to climb and sit on the sculpture, which explores links between architecture and the world.
Tsang, a Toronto-based ceramic artist, builds experimental, detailed sculptures that explore identity, womanhood and culture.
Rutkauskas, from Kelowna, has haunting photos that look at the aftermath of the 2023 McDougall Creek Wildfire, which burned more than 200 homes and land across West Kelowna B.C.
A Regina-based artist, Logan looks at the interconnectedness of human relationships and nature in the new work, Persephone.
McCavour is a Toronto-based artist who uses a sewing machine to create “thread drawings” that are part of her large-scale embroidered installations.
Last but not least, artist Wally Dion’s two prints, Prairie Braids, are “powerful and intimate portraits that address the pervasive issue of police brutality against Indigenous populations in Canada,” according to the news release.
Marcelo Suaznabar, “Creature XXIX,” 2023, bronze, 5.5"W x 3"H x 12"D (courtesy of Gallery Merrick)
Bolivian Artist Marcelo Suaznabar “Converges Tradition With Contemporary Surrealism”
Playful, surreal, mysterious and magical — that's what to expect at Bolivian-Canadian artist Marcelo Suaznabar's eponymous new exhibition, on view now through March 14 at Gallery Merrick in Victoria.
The series of imaginative, unusual works are inspired by the landscapes of Suaznabar's homeland — and of life in general. “In my figures, there is symbolism of life, nature, the environment, progress, time, death, the universe and the confusion of the human mind,” Sauznabar has said.
“My conscious intentions are to comment on the looming environmental catastrophe that becomes increasingly unavoidable due to the structure of human society, with all its greed and temptation for the soul.”
Largely self-taught, Suaznabar was born in the city of Oruro in mid-western Bolivia and studied art briefly in Chile before moving to Canada in 2001. A painter and sculptor, he works in a variety of mediums including terracotta, bronze and oil. His art has been featured in many group and solo shows around the world, including the National Museum of Art in La Paz, Bolivia and the 2019 Latin American Art Triennial in New York. ■
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