just beyond

Born in Trinidad and raised in Toronto, artist Denyse Thomasos (1964-2012) left an indelible mark on contemporary painting. When most painters of her generation were forsaking abstract language, she embraced it. Through pattern, scale and repetition, she conveys the vastness of events – such as the Transatlantic slave trade – without exploiting the images of those who were most affected. As one of the finest painters to emerge in the 1990s, Thomasos had a singular style that employed abstraction as a means to explore contemporary issues of race, the architecture of confinement and our multivalent relationships to space and place and the environment. 

Curated by Renée van der Avoird, AGO Assistant Curator, Canadian Art; Sally Frater, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Guelph; and Michelle Jacques, Head of Exhibitions and Collections / Chief Curator at Remai Modern, Denyse Thomasos: just beyond is co-organized by the AGO and Remai Modern, Saskatoon. Spanning four decades of artmaking, the retrospective features more than 70 paintings and works on paper from several series – including Excavations, Dwellings and Dismantle – alongside archival photographs, sketches, interviews and documentary footage of Thomasos at work. 

The AGO has had a sustained critical engagement with Thomasos’ work since the 1990s. This exhibition highlights not only numerous AGO acquisitions, but research gleaned from an academic symposium organized by the AGO in 2021 that helped reignite interest in her work and propel her to the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Featuring loans from museums and private collections in Toronto, Montreal and New York City, curators worked closely with the artist’s family and gallerist, Olga Korper Gallery, to include rarely seen sketches, photographs and documentary footage of Thomasos working in her studio.

Denyse Thomasos. Arc, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, overall: 335.3 × 609.6 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchase, with funds from the Women's Art Initiative, 2022. © The Estate of Denyse Thomasos and Olga Korper Gallery, Photo: Michael Cullen. 2021/356

When Thomasos died tragically in 2012, she was at the height of her career, with major museum shows, a full professorship, New York and Toronto gallery representation, and many prestigious awards and residencies. 

“Thomasos’ talent and ambition made her one of the finest painters of her generation and in the years since her passing, the relevance of her work has only increased. Her deep commitment to narratives of the Black experience, structures of authority and the architecture of surveillance, has only made her singular talent more prescient,” say co-curators van der Avoird, Frater and Jacques. “In documentary footage, in her diaries and in the interviews of those who knew her, a portrait of an exceptional artist arises. We look forward to celebrating and furthering her legacy.”

The exhibition opens with a large-scale photograph of the artist at work. In 2005, while under renovation, the AGO invited contemporary artists to create site-specific wall works. For this project, Thomasos produced Hybrid Nations (2005), a massive mural that mixed computer-generated images with hand-painted details. This photo captures Thomasos at work, finessing the mural’s imagery – of cells, ribs and walls around a roofless panopticon – that she hoped would remind viewers of the connection between the present-day prison industrial complex and the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The exhibition includes a selection of Thomasos’ graduate student work. The looseness of her approach while studying at Yale University is evident in figurative works like Untitled (Self-portrait) (1984-85) and Sacrifice (1989). A haunting and unnerving scene, Sacrifice features a pile of human skulls, which thanks to gestural brushwork, fade into a muted background. This early work is among the first major paintings in which Thomasos directly references her research on slavery.

In the early 1990s, Thomasos was teaching art in Philadelphia – a period that also signalled her shift into abstraction. “The immediate experience of urban collapse had a psychological effect on my work,” she later reflected. It was during this period that she began researching mass incarceration. In Dos Amigos (Slave Boat) (1993), on loan from Cadillac Fairview, she introduces the gridded latticework and black marks that would characterize her mid-career work. These tight grids convey the inhumane, claustrophobic conditions of the boats that transported enslaved Africans to America. Rally (1994), with its bright colours, was inspired by the brightly painted row houses she was surrounded by in Philadelphia.  

On loan from The Donovan Collection, University of St. Michael’s College is Babylon (2005) – a large-scale work reflective of the shifts happening in Thomasos’ work in the mid-2000s. New colours, a dense matrix of structures and nods to graffiti and urban planning are seen. Religious references reoccur throughout her work. The title of this work is thought to reference the Mesopotamian City of the Old Testament.

In 2011, Thomasos returned to Ontario for a site-specific installation at Oakville Galleries and on view at the AGO are a selection of preparatory drawings done in acrylic on paper. These vivid plans suggest an attempt to reconcile futuristic green architecture, with race and class divides, and across them are scribbles of her own process notes – ‘moss insulation’, ‘green gardens’, ‘prisons as pods’.

Filmed and compiled by Thomasos’ widower Samein Priester, a selection of never-before-seen documentary footage showcases Thomasos at work in her studio. Interviews with co-curator Michelle Jacques, Thomasos’ former painting teacher John Armstrong, and her former studio assistant Linda Martinello provide commentary throughout.

The exhibition concludes with the imposing six-by-three metre canvas, Arc (2009) (image above), making its debut here. A recent AGO acquisition made with the generous support of the Women’s Art Initiative, Arc reveals traces of the artist’s body through swoops, strokes and drips of paint. The largest scale she worked on, this canvas is the same size as the wall in Thomasos’ East Village, New York, studio.

Thomasos spent most of her professional career in New York City. She earned a BA in Painting and Art History from the University of Toronto in 1987, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 1988 and the following year, completed her MFA in Painting and Sculpture, Yale School of Art, Yale University. Throughout her career, she attended various residencies, such as the Ucross Foundation Artist Residency, in Ucross, Wyoming in 2000 and the Bogliasco Foundation Artist Residency in Genoa, Italy in 2003. She won numerous prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship Prize in 1997; the Joan Mitchell Foundation award in 1998; and the New York Foundation for the Arts award in 2008; as well as grants from both the Canada Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been collected by private collectors, as well as major corporate and public institutions, including Rutgers University, New Jersey; Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa; Bank of Montreal, Toronto; Banque Nationale du Canada, Montreal; Art Gallery of Guelph; Oakville Galleries; the Hart House Collection at the University of Toronto, and private collections throughout Canada and the United States. 

Denyse Thomasos: just beyond is free for AGO Members, Annual Passholders, all Indigenous Peoples and visitors aged 25 and under. AGO Members see it first beginning October 5. The exhibition will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated hardcover 180-page catalogue available at shopAGO, co-published by the AGO, Remai Modern and DelMonico Books • D.A.P., featuring essays by van der Avoird, Frater and Jacques along with contributions from Adrienne Edwards, Marsha Pearce and Denise Ryner. This exhibition will tour and be presented at Remai Modern, Saskatoon in spring 2023.