IN THE NEWS - Leng/Geher

R.M. VAUGHAN | Columnist

From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, May. 13, 2011 5:00PM EDT

Russell Leng and Judith Geher at Parts Gallery

Until May 22, 1150 Queen St. E., Toronto; www.partsgallery.ca

When you first walk into Parts Gallery, you may wonder why the gallerist has placed painters Russell Leng and Judith Geher side by side. Two more apparently different painters would be hard to imagine.

Leng, an emerging artist from Vancouver, paints images of sharp, pointy crystals on solid or two-toned backdrops. His many faceted subjects block and absorb light in equal measure, and can be both cold, rendered in fractal variations of grey, and mysterious, filled with the ephemeral, untouchable inner light. Geher, conversely, is almost too expressive. Her portraits of young women are rendered in gooey daubs, liquid strokes, and occasional splats of honey sweet pigment. Geher has more flesh tones on her palette than any three makeup counters, and is happy to let them slide together like butter takes to cream, milk to sugar.

Underneath this seeming dichotomy, however, lurks a fascination, evident in both sets of paintings, with the act of mark making. Leng’s twinkling crystals, diamond hard as they are, are created via the faintest of brushstrokes, a whispering, feather light application of paint to panel. Geher’s fresh-face, blossoming young women are brought to life with unapologetically aggressive brushwork, with a shatter, stab, and cut abandon. It’s as if the two artists met, agreed on their topics, then swapped painting styles – for fun, and to disrupt our expectations of how their culturally loaded subjects ought to be conveyed.

Hats off to Parts Gallery for introducing Leng’s Ginger Rogers to Geher’s Fred Astaire.

RUSSELL LENG - APRIL 21-MAY 15

We are happy to welcome Russell Leng for his first exhibition in Toronto. Russell is lives and works in Vancouver where he been exhibiting since graduating from Trinity Western University. His latest painting series explores the formal geometry of the natural world along with our transformative encounters with the landscape and how we see it.

JUDITH GEHER - APRIL 21 - MAY 15

New work by emerging Toronto painter Judith Geher.

A series of 6 intimate studies flanked by a pair of large oil paintings make for a fresh exhibition to welcome a long awaited spring. Geher continues to push her investigation into the aesthetic qualities of colour and texture accomplished by oil paint and it's representation of the female form.

Preview - New Photo-Based Work

RIC SANTON
UPCOMING EXHIBITION MAY 2011













see more here

Works on Paper -

GARY CLEMENT

residential birds
ink on paper


Francis Bacon
ink on paper


Fort Lauderdale
ink on paper


Human brain (not to scale)
ink on paper


July 19 1969
ink on paper


July 20 1969
ink on paper


KELLY GRACE

untitled(fairy 1)
graphite on paper


untitled(fairy 2)
graphite on paper


untitled(fairy 3)
graphite on paper


untitled(deer)
graphite on paper


untitled(portrait)
graphite on paper


RIC SANTON

hey sappy
shelf paper, marker


you're kidding me
shelf paper


Give
watercolour


Go
watercolour


Babe rainbow
watercolour

On the Web - Jeffery Harrison

"Unedit My Heart" blog
monday, november 29, 2010

Driving Art Up the Wall: Jeff Harrison

This past week, I've gone to a few fun shows that have artists working intensively with walls. All three are recommended for a drop by. For his exhibition at Parts Gallery, pictured above, Jeff Harrison takes his characteristically crazy-busy canvas style and extends it onto screenprints on newsprint, which paper the walls. Extra prints were handed out for free at the opening, and Parts tells me they still have a few on hand if you'd like. My favourite work in the show was was a work that spelled out "GRAVY," a word which seemed to sum up, for me, the enjoyable excess that characterizes Harrison's best work.

Leah Sandals is a freelance arts writer for the National Post, Globe and Mail and Canadian Art.

(post abbreviated by PG)

PUNCHY ALL THE TIME - update

We finished installing Jeffrey Harrison's show which opens tomorrow.
The walls are covered with hand-pulled one of a kind screenprints done on newsprint and the canvas paintings are hung over that.
It all makes for a truly ebullient exhibition.

SPOILER: Along with fruit punch, Jeff will be giving away some screen prints at the opener Thursday November 18.
after that they will be available for ten bucks.