Champ

About Champ

This colorful abstract acrylic painting is by Canadian artist Milly Ristvedt.

Inspired by modernist mentors, in the 1970s Milly Ristvedt used simple formats on raw canvas to display a wash of intense colors. This acrylic painting has a joyful color palette as bands of saturated deep blue, magenta, a rich red, and sienna stretch across the canvas. Each band of color reveals sections of the white canvas that appear as organic shapes in each row.
Milly Ristvedt has spent more than five decades exploring the world of color in her artwork and has become internationally recognized for her wholly distinctive visual language.

“In Montreal, I continued to explore raw canvas as a pictorial element using it as negative or positive space within different formal structures…The raw canvas becomes a positive space in Champ…as I explored Kenneth Noland’s technique of scrubbing layers of color washes into the canvas.” Milly Ristvedt

“These paintings demonstrate Ristvedt’s efforts to find simplified formats which allow color to operate freely. Her admiration for such modern masters as Henri Matisse, Jack Bush, and Jules Olitski, is evident, but her pictures are not overly derived from any of these painters. Instead, they suggest her sympathetic acceptance of modernist ideas about color, structure, and space.”
Karen Wilkin, Art Critic

Milly Ristvedt was born in British Columbia and studied at the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University). Her first solo exhibit was at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery in Toronto. Her work has been included in many publications, She was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2004 and honored with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. She has won seven Canada Council awards and two Ontario Arts Council awards and had over 50 solo exhibitions and been part of countless group shows.
Ristvedt's work can be found in major public collections throughout North America including the National Gallery of Canada.

Milly Ristvedt is represented exclusively by the Oeno Gallery.