MEASURES

November 6 - November 29, 2014

Odon Wagner Contemporary is pleased to present MEASURES, Pierre Coupey's first solo show with the gallery and in Toronto. 

MEASURES runs November 6 – 29, 2014. 

Opening Reception with artist: Thursday, November 6, 6-9 pm 

RSVP to Reception: Click Here

Pierre Coupey is a Vancouver-based painter and printmaker, who exhibits widely across Canada, the United States, Japan and Europe. Major public collections include the Burnaby Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Kelowna Art Gallery, Simon Fraser University Art Gallery, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery. 

MEASURES will feature new works that "explore an extremity of emotion that the slightly uptight Cezanne could only dream of attaining. This is not a visual comparison so much as an optical thermometer designed to take the temperature of our temperaments, and if you look long and soft into their glorious flatness you will easily manage to see what jazz looks like, or smell what jasmine sounds like, or taste what hope feels like. Coupey states: "My work doesn't depict 'the real,' but re-enacts 'the real' through the proprioception of rimed experience, language, landscape and art. My interest is not in representation, but in presentation."

"Emotion, of course, has always been one of the pillars of abstract expressionism in its formal sense, undiluted by thought and yet so thoughtful at the same time. "In my practice it isn't 'reason over passion,' or 'passion over reason,' but 'reason with passion'", is how Coupey expresses his attempt to reconcile what so many others have tried to categorize so exclusively. "My work is shaped by three principles, each emphasizing the open-ended process of making paintings: development by transformation; form is never more than an extension of content; and the medium is the message." 

Excerpts from essay by Vancouver based art critic/ curator, Donald Brackett, included in catalogue 

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