Phoenix

About Phoenix

Horizontal bars of blue, maroon, cherry red, pink, lemon yellow, burnt orange and green communicate on a soaked sand-coloured ground in the two panels that form this 9-foot square acrylic diptych painting on canvas. The rhythm of the spaces between the short lengths of colour creates a dialogue of movement that leads the eye upwards through the large picture plane. About the inspiration for the work, the artist wrote:
"This is one of the rare paintings that I saw clearly in a dream and painted almost exactly as I saw it. It relates back to the four-panel work, Lock-Up (1972), done a couple of months earlier, where I used the physical break between panels as an edge to anchor some colour bars. In Phoenix, some bars are anchored while others float within the larger ground colour."

This painting was included in the exhibition catalogue Milly Ristvedt-Handerek: Paintings of a Decade (1979).

Milly Ristvedt, RCA, began her career in Toronto in 1964 after studies with Takao Tanabe at the Vancouver School of Art. In Toronto, during the 1960s and 1970s, she was making and exhibiting large-scale paintings alongside a small but defined group of non-figurative painters who, like Ristvedt, had planted roots in modernism. Of Ristvedt and her work in this period, Barry Lord wrote exuberantly in "Three Young Canadians," in Art in America (1969): "...More insistent than Bush, more consciously structured than Molinari."

These modernist roots continue to run deep for Ristvedt who completed her MA in Art History at Queen's University in 2011 with a thesis that explored colour in the grid of contemporary painting. Ristvedt's paintings are part of private and public collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. She has had over 50 solo exhibitions. In 2012, she received the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal for her service as an advocate for artists. She has had over 50 solo exhibitions and been part of countless group shows.

Milly Ristvedt is represented exclusively by Oeno Gallery.