| Susan Avishai |
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Susan Avishai began her artistic journey as a two year old in Montreal, the night her father’s ball point pen fell out of his pocket while tucking her into bed. Her bed sheet became her canvas which she eventually traded for an artist’s canvas, creating artworks with Arthur Lismer at the Musee des Beaux Arts on Saturday mornings as a child, and later as a teenager at the Academie Julien in Paris. Susan’s life has taken her from Montreal to Jerusalem, New York, Boston and back again, each city signaling a new stage in her life, and a new perspective to her artwork. “These abstract paintings and drawings have been evolving over the past two years from my own imperative to abandon the tangible object as reference, and the intellect as critic. Rather, I am responding with each new mark or colour on the canvas to those which have come before. What starts randomly turns deliberate. The paintings all seem to contain the rounded square, as figure and/or window, singly or in masses. In some paintings they succumb to gravity; in some they repel or attract each other as magnets. What intrigues me is their engagement with each other, and their energy in space. They can appear as webs or primordial soups, bubbles or views of the ground from high above. The imagery is, in fact, what the viewer makes of it, and I feel the work succeeds only when it becomes a dialogue.” Education
Solo Exhibitions 2009 Spring Forward, Petroff Gallery, Toronto, ON 2008 Soul of the Machine, TYPE Books, Toronto, ON Group Exhibitions 2009 The New Hybrids, The Mississauga Living Arts Centre, Mississauga, ON2006-09 The Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto, ON Awards 2002 First Place- Diversity in White, Roanoke, VA1997 First Place- All New England Colour Show, Cohasset, MA |