Respiration at COOPER COLE

Artists: Marvin Luvualu António, Georgia Dickie, Kate Newby, Paul P.

Exhibition title: Respiration

Venue: COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada

Date: July 21 – September 9, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and COOPER COLE, Toronto

COOPER COLE is pleased to present Respiration, a group exhibition that brings together a diverse collection of paintings and sculptures. This exhibition aims to stimulate contemplation about our existence, navigating the intricate web of familiar and futuristic emotions associated with urban dystopia.

Against the backdrop of current ecological events, degrading infrastructure, and sociological strife, Respiration, serves as a poignant reflection on the human experience within our contemporary metropolises. Through the interplay of materials and form, the pairing of paintings and sculptural works in this exhibition provoke introspection and invite viewers to explore enigmatic feelings of isolation and ineﬃcacy, as well as the fragile nature of our natural and urban surroundings.

Marvin Luvualu António (b. 1986, St. Petersburg, Russia) is an Angolan-Canadian visual artist whose interdisciplinary work explores but is not limited to the topics of seeing as listening, identify politics and the artist as subject. He has shown his works in solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, Lyles & King, New York; Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto; and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town. He has also participated in group exhibitions at The Kitchen, New York and the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver. In 2015, he was awarded an AIMIA | Art Gallery of Ontario Photography Prize scholarship. Marvin Luvualu António currently lives and works in Toronto.

Georgia Dickie (b.1989, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) makes sculptural work out of found objects that she collects in her studio. Her process of reassembling these materials into new arrangements is based on a logic of eschewing and rebalancing their assigned functions. By staging these intricate assemblages, she not only reveals the inherent limitations of material value and meaning, but subverts the ways we are conditioned to see the world in a capitalist, essentializing society, and points towards potentials that emerge from environmental consciousness.

Georgia Dickie earned her BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2011. She was one of the recipients of the 2020 Sobey Art Award, and the 2014 recipient of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Prize. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions internationally including Soft Opening, London; Fragment Gallery, Moscow; Oakville Galleries, Oakville; Rolando Anselmi, Berlin; Jeﬀrey Stark, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore; Art Museum of U of T, The Power Plant, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Cooper Cole, Toronto. In February 2015, she was the Canada Council for the Arts artist in residence at Acme Studios in London, UK. Georgia Dickie currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Kate Newby (b. 1979, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand) creates site-responsive works that are inserted directly into exhibition spaces and surrounding areas. Newby creates handmade, crudely constructed sculptural interventions that simultaneously connect and contrast their environments. Drawing out both the physical and poetic qualities of materials (usually materials such as concrete, textiles, glass, and ceramics), her work explores whether situational context can be just as informative as materiality and content. Underpinning Newby’s process is a performative ethos: she investigates the way material interventions made in response to a site’s particular temporal, physical, and geographical conditions can be a means of transformation and intervention.

Kate Newby received her Doctorate of Fine Art in 2015 from the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. Recent institutional exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, Wellington; The Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; 21st Biennale of Sydney; Sculpture Center, New York. In 2012, she won the Walters Prize, New Zealand’s largest contemporary art prize, and in 2019 Newby was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. Kate has undertaken residencies at The Chinati Foundation, Artpace, Fogo Island, and the International Studio & Curatorial Program ISCP. Kate Newby currently lives and works in Floresville, Wilson County, Texas.

Paul P. (b. 1977, Canada) first gained attention for his drawings and paintings of young men that systematically re-imagined found erotic photographs along nineteenth century aesthetic modes. His portraits are appropriated from gay erotic magazines, specifically those produced in the years bracketed by the beginning of gay liberation and the advent of the AIDS crisis; a period of provisional freedoms. In recent years the artist’s interests in transience, desire, cataloging, and notation has expanded to include landscapes and their abstraction, and to sculptural works in the form of furniture.

Paul P. was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, New York and the 2018 Front International Cleveland Triennial. He has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions including X Museum, Beijing, China; Morena di Luna/Maureen Paley, Hove, UK; Museum of Modern Art, Queer Thoughts, Broadway 1602, Participant, New York; Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico; Cooper Cole, Scrap Metal, Toronto; Participant Inc., New York; Griﬃn Art Projects, Vancouver; Freud Museum, Maureen Paley, London; The Suburban, Oak Park; Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Austria; Cooper Cole, Power Plant, Toronto; among others. Paul P.’s artwork can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Whitney Museum, among others. Paul P. lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Respiration, 2023, exhibition view, COOPER COLE, Toronto

Marvin Luvualu Antonio, Forbidden relics II, 2023, Mixed media, stone slab, 8 x 16 in (20.3 x 40.6 cm)

Marvin Luvualu Antonio, Forbidden relics V, 2023, Mixed media, stone slab, 8 x 16 in (20.3 x 40.6 cm)

Respiration, 2023, exhibition view, COOPER COLE, Toronto

Georgia Dickie, Respiration Installation, 2023, Mixed Media, found objects

Marvin Luvualu Antonio, Yes, Auntie?, 2018, Acrylic and pencil on cotton canvas, 68 x 66 in (172.7 x 167.6 cm)

Respiration, 2023, exhibition view, COOPER COLE, Toronto

Kate Newby, The top blew off, 2015-2020, High fired porcelain and stoneware, earthenware, mason stain, thread, rope, 22 x 58 x 10 in (55.9 x 147.3 x 25.4 cm)