Anda Kubis
Anda Kubis
"Stacks of Shine" fuses relentless joy with the romanticism of light. Exploring an evolving colour vocabulary, Anda Kubis shies away from the neutralized, all-over fuzziness of her previous work to let colour now radiate from clearly suggested structures. Blocks of lime green and deep wine maroon squeeze patches of fuchsia within the large oil paintings; glowing auras of pigment are stacked and distinctly placed. The space of Kubis's abstraction is never one of disorder. The forms allude to comfort and harmony and inform the surface with a fictitious reference to vintage photography.
Her trademark contrast of minimalist design and romantic space has evolved into a fusion of both. The blurred aspects of the paintings now embrace the brush stroke. Kubis's work has always tended to appear out of focus, but now, with the heightened presence of the brush stroke, the paintings offer compositions of structure and stability rather than open fields of colour. The varying strength and weakness of the chosen colours creates a back-and-forth sense of pictorial space that recalls photographic depth of field. Kubis plays with the tangibility of abstract form by embracing the manipulation of saturated colour. The various hues jostle for position yet remain in flux, shifting and floating to provide a sense of motion within static form. It is in the detail of specific corners and crevices, specific moments, that we find a progression from restrained minimalism to defiant brushwork that delivers a plethora of form.
The work's blocks of looming colour seduce the senses. With modernist design and formats of advertising graphics as points of departure, the paintings have a physicality that delivers an innate sense of expanding space. Clusters of coloured abstraction emulate the vivacity of their sources, extending them into fragmented, modelled and intersecting profusions of colour.
Kubis's calculated approach consolidates a range of historical and formal sources together with her own nostalgic joy in them. It is an unspoken dialogue that leads us to linger. In her paintings, the mundane shines. Transcendence is built into her abstraction.
Image captions:
Anda Kubis Caterpillar 2004 Oil on canvas 1.8 x 1.5 m Courtesy Drabinsky Gallery
Anda Kubis Warmer Territory 2004 Oil on canvas 1.8 x 1.5 m Courtesy Drabinsky Gallery
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