Lot 36
MELANIE AUTHIER (1980-)
Additional Images
Provenance:
Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto
Private Collection, Ontario
Note:
Melanie Authier has become one of Canada's most successful young abstract painters thanks to her skillful blending of art historical styles, from the Baroque to hard-edged abstraction. The slippery composition of paintings like “Fault Lines and Footholds,” as well as such a title, suggest fractured topographies, though the artist has said she does not paint with any existing landscape in mind. Rather, her paintings are abstract inventions that attempt to synthesize a number of thematic and painterly contradictions – beauty and terror; chaos and order; the gestural and the geometric – leading critics to label her images “gorgeous conundrums.”
We thank Bill Clarke for contributing this essay. Bill Clarke is a Toronto-based writer, editor, art collector and occasional curator.