“Let mistakes lead to invention”

Long recognized for her Canadian landscapes, Vancouver-based artist Gina Sarro has gradually shifted her paintings further away from literal representation, and closer toward a depiction of the simplified shapes and colours of her imaginary compositions. While her subjects always draw from the physical world—the mountains looming over the West Coast sea, draped in shrouds of cloud and fog—Sarro’s latest body of work pushes further to edit out these elements, depicting them in their simplest form.

In Disrupted, bold gestures of colour intersect with the calm palette of the natural world, interwoven with a delicacy and a force that come together to frame a moment in time. The paintings are not site-specific, but suggest an accumulation of retrieved memories. Areas of Sarro’s canvases portray recognizable elements of nature, while other areas are so abstracted that they suggest the feeling of a painting within a painting. Together, these elements portray a mixture of the objective world and a narrative that plays out in the mind’s eye.

Acknowledging that experiences of nature can be at once elusive and definitive, structured and dispersed, ordered and chaotic, Sarro captures these juxtapositions with abandon and immediacy. Using both brush and palette knife, Sarro pays attention to the instinctive elements that come with experiencing nature, while revising them with restraint. Her landscapes transform into something simultaneously new and familiar, disrupting nature only to return it to us as an abstracted story.

For further information or high resolution images:Please contact Gina Sarro at gina@ginasarro.com or 604-773-1360.
Private viewings of the exhibition are available upon request.
Above image: “Now and then”, 40” x 40” x 1.5”, Acrylic on canvas, 2019