Wanda Koop | Flowers For Sonny Boy
2024 | WANDA KOOP
FLOWERS FOR SONNY BOY
TORONTO
Sept 14 - Oct 19, 2024
Wanda Koop | Forget-Me-Not Rose, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
48” x 48”
Blouin Division is pleased to present Flowers for Sonny Boy paintings of love and loss, an exhibition of new works by Wanda Koop.
Developed in parallel to the works for her two solo exhibitions, Who Owns the Moon at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Objects of Interest at Night Gallery (Los Angeles), these paintings strike a deeply personal chord, reflecting on the artist’s family history, her parents’ and grandparents’ expulsion from Zaporizhzhia, and the sense of history repeated as Ukrainians once again suffer the indignities of war and displacement.
As with Koop’s iconic moon paintings, in which the lunar disc becomes a beacon of our civilization’s common cause, these works imbue ordinary flowers with a cosmic resonance symbolic of hope and harmony. At once still-lives and ethereal constellations, Koop’s vibrant windows of subtly shifting colour frame as a floating garden the fragile cycle of life.
Wanda Koop is one of Canada’s most renowned living artists and has had more than sixty solo shows, including a major survey of her work mounted by the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2010 and the National Gallery of Canada in 2011, and her US debut at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2019. From the outset of her career, Koop has garnered critical and curatorial acclaim for her energetic and ambitious exploration of her medium. Starting in the 1980s, she charted new directions for painting, pushing the boundaries of presentation and display with her monumental-scale installations. Among her many awards, Koop is a Member of the Order of Canada and the recipient of a Governor General’s Medal.
Alongside her artistic practice, the painter is a community activist. In 1998 she founded Art City, a free community art centre that brings together contemporary visual artists and inner-city youth to explore the creative process. Koop is represented by Blouin Division in Montreal and Toronto, and Night Gallery in Los Angeles. She lives and works in Winnipeg, Canada.