Twelve Panels Thirty-Six Colours

About Twelve Panels Thirty-Six Colours

Twelve rectangular panels, each painted alternately in solid colours or solid with tinted vertical stripes, are installed in a precise grid: two high and six across. The artist began this work in 2003 painting two then coming back to the panels in 2013 adding verticals to create "the challenge of potential directions." The artist has painted the panels in pairs spanning over 11 feet using 18 shades of orange, gold, yellow, turquoise, gray and indigo. The title of the work doubles the number of colours used deliberately veering from an implied order created out of chance over time.

This striking work is a poetic and intellectual narrative of movement and time through the curated application of colour.
Milly Ristvedt (b. 1942, Kimberley, BC) RCA, began her career in Toronto in 1964 after studies with Takao Tanabe at the Vancouver School of Art. 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 sharing a studio with Jack Bush and showing with the Carmen Lamanna Gallery. Over her long career, Ristvedt has had over 50 solo exhibitions. Her 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. Barry Lord observed in Art in America (1969) that Ristvedt’s paintings were “…more insistent than Bush, more consciously structured than Molinari.” Ristvedt is represented exclusively by Oeno Gallery.