Urban Portrayals

October 26, 2024 - November 29, 2024

Opening: Saturday 26th of October 2024 4PM - 6PM

Artspace Warehouse is pleased to present Urban Portrayals, an exhibition that captures the many layers of city life. From busy streets to quiet corners, the works in this collection reflect the complexity, energy, and subtle beauty of urban environments. Each artist presents a unique vision of what it means to inhabit the pulse of a city - its movement, its architecture, and the moments that often go unnoticed. Urban Portrayals invites you to explore these distinct interpretations of the modern city and experience the stories they tell.

Susan Gale was born in Stephenville, Newfoundland in 1977, she studied painting at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design from 2000 to 2004 and received her BFA. Gale moved to Toronto in 2005 where she has been painting, exhibiting, and selling her work since graduating from NSCAD.

Gale's work explores the nostalgia of community by highlighting the peaceful, quiet mystery of light and juxtaposing its nuance against the rush of visually invoked sensation. She evokes the senses by exploring images with manipulation of form, surface, and palette. With this intention, she exaggerates each painting's elements of color, framing, and texture and employs rich hues and playful pointillism. Gale’s work investigates the space between abstraction and representation and allows for a rich direct language of mark-making.

Gale’s work has appeared in several home design TV shows, including Property Brothers. Her artwork has been collected throughout Canada and the US.

Born in 1958, New Zealand artist Ross Tamlin is renowned for his unique and captivating signature corrugated iron paintings. He received formal training at TAFE NSW Meadowbank in Meadowbank, Australia, where he pursued a Fine Arts Certificate course, followed by a graphic arts course in Brisbane, Australia, before returning to Sydney to establish himself as a professional artist.

Tamlin's work is a brilliant fusion of traditional art genres, including still-life and landscape, and graphic art. Influenced by the De Stijl movement, his paintings represent a perfect amalgamation of art and function. Tamlin incorporates the aesthetics of modern industrial techniques to create the illusion of corrugation in his photorealistic compositions. His paintings are created by using layers of paint and varnish to achieve a three-dimensional effect that adds depth and texture to his artwork.

Color, industrial imagery, and objects play a central role in Tamlin's work. He is fascinated by the traditional appropriation of found objects in modern art and uses them in his compositions to reconstruct their purpose and function, revealing new relationships between the object and viewer.

 

Tamlin's artwork is primarily characterized by bright colors, combined with primary hues overlaid with text and glazing, to produce his unique version of a landscape. His innovative use of text and familiar place names in his paintings creates a contemporary interpretation of landscape painting.

An Advertising and Communications graduate from Mohawk College in Hamilton, Toronto native Pete Kasprzak gained his artistic experience as a graphic designer. He designed graphics for Holt Renfrew, Coca-Cola, Calvin Klein, and The Bay, as well as Gwen Stefani and Shania Twain. His earlier artwork has graced the shelves of major retailers such as Sears, Walmart, Kmart, and HomeSense. It has also discreetly embellished the backdrop of the silver screen in various movies and TV shows.

Pete Kasprzak adds dynamic movement and texture with oil and acrylic paint on his mixed media cityscape artworks as well as creating original fine art. His vibrant urban sceneries have caught the interest of numerous art collectors, TV shows, and news outlets across Canada and the United States.

Kasprzak won the People’s Choice Award at The Artist Project Toronto, one of North America’s largest shows. His artworks are collected by SKAM Artist Studios and DJ Erick Morillo, and has created commissioned original artworks for the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Raptors which are now part of history, hanging at Scotiabank Arena.

Born in 1975 in Saratov, Russia, oil painter Ekaterina Ermilkina grew up in Crimea on the North coast of the Black Sea. In 1992, Ermilkina moved to Saint Petersburg, Russia where in 1998 she received her MFA from the State Art and Industry Academy. In 2005, Ermilkina moved to the U.S. and is now living in New Jersey. The unique beauty and rich culture of the cities she lived in inspired her to paint cityscapes.

Ermilkina's dynamic artworks vibrate with color and motion, casting a candied haze across the cityscape. Her paintings reflect our desires for beauty, poetics, and perfection. Ermilkina’s original abstract fine art paintings are created using a skillful combination of applying and removing oil paint with a palette knife on canvas. Her inspirations are the expressionistic magic skylines of big cities filled with colorful skyscrapers. The urban scenic views are abstracted and rich with vivid and textured layers. Ermilkina’s emotional architectural patchwork and mosaic cityscapes radiate a life of balance and positive energy.

Ermilkina's works have been featured in exhibitions in international galleries and art fairs and have been collected throughout the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Switzerland, Japan, Hong Kong, and UAE. Notable collectors include Kelly Clarkson, Los Angeles, CA.

Fabio Coruzzi's artworks are painted as a poetic statement. The artist does not follow any narrative but is inspired by single episodes and single thoughts. Coruzzi’s art is a fluid sequence of ideas projected into social commentary. Each artwork tells a story through detached, autonomous thoughts. Mixed media techniques mold together these different perspectives, creating an urban environment. Contemporary culture is made of controversy: modernity includes ugliness, imperfection, and contamination, anything that creates texture.

Born in Foggia, Italy in 1975, Coruzzi offers a new outlook on an otherwise ordinary urban scene. His artworks represent an authenticity unlike any other: layered, textural, controversial, open to imagination, colorful, personal, and inspiring. Coruzzi’s work encapsulates urban environments and their inhabitants. Irony is laced between figures drawn with an energetic architectural hand. His work is colorful, funny, and biting through resolutely rendered vignettes of collective cultural consciousness.