Beyond abstraction

Denyse Thomasos: just beyond opens October 8 at the AGO. This landmark exhibition encapsulates the full spectrum of Thomasos’s career and features more than 70 paintings and works on paper by the late Trinidadian-Canadian contemporary artist. Co-curated by Renée van der Avoird, Assistant Curator, Canadian Art, AGO; Sally Frater, Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Guelph; and Michelle Jacques, Head of Exhibitions and Collections / Chief Curator, Remai Modern, the show invites visitors to explore various eras of Thomasos’s artistic development, illuminating the ways her powerful approach to abstraction was formed.   

The exhibition celebrates/showcases Thomasos’s monumental abstraction for which she has been admired since the early 1990s. Drawing major reference from the grid formations present in the grim, claustrophobic structures of slave ships and prison architecture, she began to develop her signature painting style, after graduating from Yale School of Art. In the exhibition’s richly illustrated publication, curator Sally Frater discusses this critical moment in the evolution of Thomasos’s practice, writing, “After Denyse Thomasos’s shift from figurative painting to abstraction, she largely focused on the depiction of containers in her artistic practice. More accurately, she focused on depicting different types of built environments, and to be even more specific, she focused on the relationship of particular, racialized—i.e., Black—bodies to them… [Thomasos] drew attention to the critical ways in which architectural sites could be employed as structures that facilitate states of belonging or estrangement.” 

The exhibition will be the first time Thomasos’s early figurative work will be presented publicly. During her student years at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, then Yale, in the mid-to-late 1980s, Thomasos used figuration to address ideas and themes that would eventually become key in her oeuvre, including architectural structures, boats, cages and skulls. Also for the first time, visitors will be able to see a selection of archival materials that reveal her intense and complex research process.

In the early 2000s, Thomasos began to travel abroad extensively. She explored numerous countries throughout Asia and Africa, noting that her “agenda when travelling [was] figuring out indigenous structures.” Among her global destinations were rice fields in Vietnam, mud mosques in Timbuktu and Mongolian cliffside temples. Thomasos photographed these structures and used them as inspiration in her painting. Several of her travel albums, as well as selected images, are on view. just beyond features a section of works that exemplify the importance of Thomasos’s travels to her artistic development. 

Later in the 2000s, Thomasos continued her research on prisons and other structures of confinement. Within the exhibition, a section of very large works created by the artist during this period highlights a range of recurring motifs, including cross-hatched metal cages, boats, human rib cages and cell-like structures. In a 2011 statement about the direction of her practice, Thomasos candidly noted, “More and more, I recognize that my interest in imprisonment in the outside world actually stems from my own feelings of isolation and the ways I have had to survive that. With every line, every mark, it’s a language that I weave together to survive.”

In the three inner rooms of just beyond, visitors can explore works completed by Thomasos during a Ucross Foundation residency in Wyoming, alongside her sketchbooks, preparatory drawings for her massive 2011 work Kingdom Come at Oakville Galleries, and several revelatory works discovered in the artist’s studio after her unexpected death in July 2012. 

Don’t miss Denyse Thomasos: just beyond on view until February 20, 2023, at the AGO.