Milly Ristvedt, RCA

About Milly Ristvedt, RCA

Milly Ristvedt (b. 1942, Kimberley, BC) MA, RCA, began her career in Toronto in 1964 after studies with Takao Tanabe and Roy Kiyooka at the Vancouver School of Art. Ristvedt credits Tanabe with helping her refine her ability to see in first year composition, and Roy Kiyooka as her most important educational influence.  Kiyooka introduced Ristvedt to the paintings of contemporary artists such as Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, and Morris Louis who were working in series.  This altered Ristvedt’s approach to production in the early years.  However, while Ristvedt admires the discipline of seriality she prefers to set her parameters after the fact thus allowing exciting and unexpected changes to reveal themselves in the course of painting.

At 24, her work was included in the Centennial Exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario and featured at the National Gallery of Canada. She was chosen for prestigious exhibitions in Winnipeg, Paris and Lausanne. By 1969, Ristvedt was painting large canvases, sharing a studio with Jack Bush and showing with the Carmen Lamanna Gallery. That same year, Barry Lord observed in Art in America that Ristvedt’s paintings were “…more insistent than Bush, more consciously structured than Molinari.”

Over her long career, Ristvedt has had over 50 solo exhibitions. An advocate for artist's rights, Ristvedt was awarded the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. She completed an MA in Art History at Queen's University in 2011.

Ristvedt's abstract, acrylic canvases are held in private, corporate and public collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and Harvard University. 

Ristvedt is represented exclusively by Oeno Gallery.