Wanda Koop

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Winnipeg artist Wanda Koop. Having consistently exhibited for twenty-seven years, she is one of Canada's most established and respected artists. Koop's interests revolve around the issues of painting, representation and the process of "seeing."

Wanda Koop traditionally works on large format paintings and for the Contemporary Art Gallery she is presenting five 10 feet by 13 feet paintings. Visual sources for the paintings are derived from video stills that she recorded while visiting Tokyo. Her use of video is comparable to that of an artist's notebook, but its technology allows for immediacy and an ability to zoom in on details. With video, she recorded fragments of things that exist in the real world, of visual experiences that are often located in the periphery of our vision but perhaps not noticed; hence the title for this series is *See Everything/See Nothing*. As the starting point for making the paintings, these video notes are ultimately presented macroscopically thus rendering the content ambiguous. This incongruity is emphasized by the juxtaposition of paintings that appear abstract with those that appear to contain forms that are familiar. And rather than existing as autonomous objects, Koop's paintings are presented as installations in order to heighten a dialogue among the works. Within the discourse of painting, Koop is concerned with the possibility of making a painting today and with breaking our habits of perception.


Essay: "Wanda Koop: See Everything/See Nothing," Robin Laurence

A large painting is installed on a gallery wall. It contains three geometric shapes: above the black triangle at the bottom, two white trapezoids are placed partially overlapping with each other. 

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01-WandaKoop-1998.jpeg

A large painting is installed in the gallery. In the sky-blue background, two gray straight lines form a sharp angle. A navy-coloured shape resembling melting metal is drawn in between the two lines. 

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02-WandaKoop-1998.jpeg

An unframed large painting is installed on the gallery wall. An orange human head is depicted in the green background. A human face, made of a white web, is drawn over the faceless orange head. 

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03-WandaKoop-1998.jpeg

A large painting is installed on a gallery wall. Two black circles in the middle, which have organic shapes inside, are depicted in the light-gray background resembling a surface of a marble slab. 

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04-WandaKoop-1998.jpeg

Four paintings are installed in the gallery. Two on the right side wall depict black geometric shapes. The one on the inner wall shows six orange rectangles. The one on the left side wall is blue.

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Four paintings are installed on the gallery walls. Two of them mainly depict geometric and organic shapes and lines. The one in the middle depicts a human face in the green background. 

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06-WandaKoop-1998.jpeg

A large painting is installed on a gallery wall. The painting shows a close-up image of a grid made of two brown horizontal lines and one gray vertical line. The cells are painted in light orange. 

Wanda Koop

Exhibitions