May 23 - July 14, 2024

Anne-Marie Olczak is an abstract painter based in Toronto, Ontario. Her work uses the grid as a parameter to explore colour and application of paint through its constructs. Working with grids, layers and pulling inspiration from colours in her family Kodachrome slides – she captures the nostalgic saturated hues from her father’s amateur photography of her youth.

Projections of images created from old slides featured within the gallery space will be a further nod to the inspiration of the colour, and the ways our memories and “old technologies” play into our modern techniques and perceptions.

Admission to the gallery is free.

An Opening Reception will be held in the gallery on Sunday May 26th from 2-4PM.  Meet the artist, mingle and enjoy refreshments with community.  All are welcome! Admission is free.

About the Artist:

THOUGHTS ON COLOUR: “There is something about memory that is intrinsically attached to our senses.  The attachment of colour to a memory is what I am exploring through painting.  It started with being given a sampler tube of cadmium red as part of a gift bag at an art event.  Red has until this point not been a large part of my paint palette, but this red reminded me of a hat I had as a child, bought as a souvenir after a family trip to an amusement park.  That memory and that colour sent me on a journey that pushed my perceptions and understanding of how colour works in memory and in art and in composition, in process and in our emotional response to a painting.

Using old family slides, the Kodachromes,   I challenge my usual palette of colour.  I am fascinated by the super saturated colour associated with this film development process and I set out to try to match these colours with my paints and pigments. What started as an exercise in exploring colour became more about memory and nostalgia. Working in the grid allows an order in which to explore these ideas: containing them in a structure that controls the emotion associated wit the memory associate with the colours and the inspirational slide. Composition starts with the image on the slide, but is blown up into larger version of those snaps shots in the slides.  Layering of colour, slowly applied, of grids and lines, create a depth in these paintings that evoke an emotional response in the viewer, triggering memory or emotion associated with these colours. “

Anne-Marie’s paintings explore colour and composition through abstraction by distilling spaces and structures through the form of the grid. The grid provides a starting parameter where details are expressed through the colour and the intersections of layers of paints and glazes. Working in acrylic demands an immediacy in the process, working deliberately and meditatively as the paint is applied while maintaining the integrity of the details of the canvas. Process and colour are hugely important to how Anne-Marie works. Recent works (the Kodachrome series) use old family slides to pull colour inspiration and push beyond the comfort of a familiar palette as well as exploring memory through the layers of the grid.

She has selected works in numerous galleries around the Greater Toronto area as well as in collections in the US and Britain.

For more information about the artist, please visit her website.