Artwork by Denyse Thomasos,  Urban Jewels Series (Dismantle #4) 1998

Denyse Thomasos
Urban Jewels Series (Dismantle #4) 1998

acrylic on canvas
signed faintly on the reverse; unframed
69 x 72 ins ( 175.3 x 182.9 cms )

Auction Estimate: $9,000.00$7,000.00 - $9,000.00

Price Realized $15,340.00
Sale date: June 2nd 2020

Provenance:
Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto
Literature:
Murray Whyte, “Denyse Thomasos: The late artist's early years, on display at the MacLaren Art Centre”, The Toronto Star [online], September 13, 2013
The Urban Jewels Series was completed when Thomasos was a young professor first at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, and then at Rutgers in Newark. During this period, the artist was faced head on with the overt racism of urban America, the likes of which she had never experienced. On these works of the mid-to-late 1990s, Thomasos wrote that, growing up in Toronto, “my knowledge of black culture and history was limited. My early artwork was both an attempt to capture the emotion of isolation and a means to learn about myself with respect to black culture, history and politics.”

The layered composition of “Urban Jewels Series (Dismantle #4)” explodes with agitated energy bursting from the confines of the stretched canvas. Brightly layered bars of colour crisscross and stack on top of one another, forming an abstracted urban landscape of densely packed buildings patterning the composition. Works from this series reference the architectonic, cultural and historical references related to her investigations of the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. She was also responding to her particular exploration into her personal and family identity through the formation of Diaspora in the West Indies via modern migration patterns. These works are visual representations of this interconnected patterning of human movement and settlement, fundamentally shaping urban landscapes and identities.

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Denyse Thomasos
(1964 - 2012)

Born in 1964 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Thomasos emigrated with her family to Canada in 1970, settling in Mississauga, Ontario. Earning her Bachelor of Arts in painting and art history at the University of Toronto in 1987, she went on to receive her MFA in painting and sculpture at the Yale School of Art in 1989.

Her works are accomplished in a semi-abstract style and focus on urban landscapes while conveying themes of slavery, confinement and the story of African and Asian Diaspora. Political in nature, her works were inspired by her extensive travel and development of rapidly growing communities imploring the viewer to consider mass organization as forms and figures stack on top of one another. There is a nod to architectural drawings and blue prints with an emphasis on line and geometry in her works with a strong trace of the artist's gesture.

Thomasos was a professor at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, and then (beginning in 1995), Associate Professor of Art at  Rutgers University's Arts, Culture and Media Department. She was awarded a 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 1999 Canada Council Millennium Grant, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting and completed a travel residency at the American Academy in Rome.  The artist passed away unexpectedly from an allergic reaction during a medical procedure in 2012 in New York.