Eva Koller Davies, queen of colour, opens show at art gallery

NEWS RELEASE

MICHAEL BURTCH, DIRECTOR/CURATOR, ART GALLERY ALGOMA

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Upcoming Exhibition
Art Gallery of Algoma
EVA KOLLER DAVIES : Screens, Paintings, Works on Paper
December 15 to January 21, 2006

Meet the Artist Reception Saturday December 17 at 2 p.m.
www.evakollerdavies.ca

Toronto artist Eva Koller Davies' work is a celebration, above all else, of colour.

Whatever the vehicle she employs – construction, painting on canvas or paper, or three-dimensional screens, her motivation comes from the expressive power of colour.

Colour provides the structure, the dynamism, and the scale to her practice.

She also has an uncanny sensitivity to the support she chose for the orchestrations of colour; paper is approached in a soft aqueous fashion, the wooden screens a hard-edged building of colour, her canvases support almost architectonic and symphonic layering of planes of colour, and her constructions a delicacy of colour that permits the structure of the physical relief to take precedence.

The artist's use of watercolour on paper fully exploits the wet paper technique by allowing colours to bleed softly into each other.

They are wonderful free-form improvisations that evoke pre-formative nebulae, incubators of new forms.

Constructivism provides Koller Davies with the means to further explore the dynamic tensions between two and three-dimensional readings of space.

Through embossing and the introduction of fragments of other materials onto the surface the resulting tension owes less to colour than them it does to the subtle play of relief elements explicitly through physicality of collaged elements and implicitly through the teasing play of light against the embossed surface.

The constructions also provide the artist with a venue to exalt in her considerable graphic design skills.

The intimacy and relative simplicity of the constructions offer an opportunity to see Eva Koller Davies at her creative best.