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Katie Pretti: Ghost in transit

Abstract painter Katie Pretti’s latest exhibition at Neubacher Shor Contemporary is a beautifully expressive meditation on the feeling of being in transit. Her large canvases capture the confusion and displacement Pretti feels as she travels endlessly from place to place, with no opportunity to feel completely at home. The organic line and soft, swirling brushwork project a ghostly, roaming presence, leading the eye, like Pretti, to travel around and around each piece, never permitted to rest or unwind.

Above: Katie Pretti, 4th Pathway 8, 2012, acrylic, oil stick, oil pastel, graphite on canvas, 48 in x 48 inches. At top: Katie Pretti, 4th Pathway 5, 2012, oil on canvas. Images courtesy of Neubacher Shor

In the press release, Pretti says she feels like a ghost. “Being in transit can have that effect of a person,” Pretti writes. “A Tibetan might call it a bardo, a place between death and birth. Sometimes people don�t even know they�re dead and they keep walking around, enacting their daily routines, but they have no body. They no longer have any real connection to what they still believe is their life.”

–Arianna Perricone

Installation view of “Swoon.” Image courtesy of Neubacher Shor

“Katie Pretti: Swoon,” Neubacher Shor Contemporary, Toronto, ON. Through November 24, 2012.

Related posts:
Report from Toronto
Last chance: Sadko Hadzihasanovic at Paul Petro (2009)
Questioning Canadian painting’s carte blanche (2008)




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