Kline & Kolakis

McBride Contemporain is delighted to announce Kline & Kolakis, a duo exhibition featuring new works by Montreal-based artists Chris Kline and Valerie Kolakis. We are honoured and excited to begin our season’s programming with this ambitious and transporting exhibition. These two artists, well-known to the Quebec contemporary art audience, bring a measured, serious and virtuosic intelligence and technique to every project, every work they execute. To exhibit them in this pairing provides a unique chance to consider these masterful visual artists in intimate conversation.

Chris Kline’s works resourcefully synthesize a range of the historical concerns in abstraction with deftness and deep personal commitment. Kline’s procedure is incredibly patient and painstaking, and the result is that every piece makes us aware of our minutest perceptions, our sensitivity to hue and illumination, our ability to positively differentiate between passages of tone and materiality - as well as gently asking us to consider what these differentiations and phenomenal moments mean. Kline successfully delivers the satisfaction of slowly contemplating an image that is an object and vice versa.

Valerie Kolakis’ practice is fuelled by powerful but subtle conceptual interests, that permeate the visual decisions and aesthetic systems she deploys. Her recent work has sprung from her thoughtful and profound reaction to this new social era’s reality, of isolation and alienation, both in the public and private spheres. The artist is concerned to somehow reintegrate her perceptions, and ours, of this new layer of fabrication in our experience of moving through and perceiving space, both acculturated and existential.

Kline & Kolakis is an exhibition that vitally juxtaposes these two mature artistic visions, the one in painting that moves from the personal to the formal in terms of how the work is made; and the other quite the opposite, from the visual generality to the specific registration of a complex human problem. Taken together, Kline and Kolakis offer a bracing, and potentially healing experience for the viewer.