Rally

Art Gallery of Ontario

Rally 1994 acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the Estate of Denyse Thomasos and Olga Korper Gallery Audio description of the work. This monumental work is an abstract painting in landscape orientation. It is 9 feet or almost 3 meters tall by 14 feet or around 4 meters wide. This painting is composed of tight stacks of similar horizontal brush strokes in multiple vivid colours. There are 22 stacks from left to right and an average of 50 brush strokes in each stack. By this count the work totals 1100 repeated brushstrokes. Each column counts multiple short stacks. In each stack the same colour is repeated an average of 6 times; the predominant colours are orange, blue and red and less so, purple, white and yellow. The canvas behind the brushstrokes is painted with vivid colours which peek through. In the sixth stack near the top left there is one small section where the brush strokes line up vertically instead of horizontally and close by another small section has both horizontal and vertical lines. End of Audio description. Exhibition label text: Thomasos spent the early 1990s teaching art in Philadelphia. During this period, she witnessed the devastating conditions many Black people lived in due to poverty. The artist revealed that “the immediate experience of urban collapse had a psychological effect on my works.” She also began her research on mass incarceration during this time. Here, Thomasos paints countless grids in a variety of colours, inspired by the brightly painted row houses she saw in Philadelphia. In a 2012 artist statement, she described seeing pink, green, and bright- blue homes situated beside bombed-out or abandoned houses. She wrote, “I developed my palette from the contradiction of brights and greys intermingled, symbolizing life among the dead.” End of Exhibition label text.