The Marianne van Silfhout Gallery at St. Lawrence College is pleased to present the works of Ottawa artist, Karen Goetzinger. The online exhibition is on view March 28 to May 6, 2022.
The virtual show, entitled Visible Mending, includes eight large abstract and emotive paintings that “capture frequently overlooked, modest moments that illuminate our humanity and our longing to connect with each other,” according to the artist's statement.
“Through my gestural paintings I aim to capture those overlooked modest moments of beauty, revealed unexpectedly perhaps in the imperfect and the fleeting, but that nevertheless illuminate our humanity and our longing to connect with each other. I record the feeling and emotion of that moment of discovering beauty in the inconsequential. Words rarely come easily for me, one thought splits into another and then another. Each blank canvas allows me to expressively explore the vocabulary of colour and marks as a way to record, without literal references, the thoughts, impressions, and memories of a singular day or place in time.” (From the artist's website.)
Included in this collection are some unstretched pieces, hanging in the manner of weavings or tapestries. Several of the paintings consist of canvases that have been pieced together, with hand stitching, from smaller pieces of canvas, thereby creating a symbolic correlation to the mending of textiles. They reinforce the proposition of visible mending and further support the idea of the beauty found in “imperfection.”
For more information on Karen Goetzinger: karengoetzinger.com