Featured Artist: Tristesse Seeliger

Art Rental & Sales at the Vancouver Art Gallery is pleased to present Point of Life, a show of new work by AR&S Featured Artist Tristesse Seeliger. 

What Are We If Not What the Light Makes Us, 2023, Tristesse Seeliger, Acrylic on canvas, 48" x 60"

In her latest series of paintings, Point of Life, Tristesse Seeliger employs solid lines of color alongside expressive and gestural mark-making to create a sense of visual depth. Clearly defined and controlled lines are interlaced with spontaneous pours and splatters of paint to reveal contrasts between static and shifting forms, permanent shapes, and fleeting fragments.

In the black, grey, and white series of paintings, distinctions are revealed through gestural explorations, reflecting the intricate relationship between the hand, eye and brain. These simple gestures convey complex emotion, thought, movements, and expressions. The color paintings further develop this relationship by incorporating additional lines, spills, and mark-making techniques to layer, weave, and loop around each other.

Seeliger considers these painterly pathways as a form of human mapping. Inspired by the concept of "Point of Life" from Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps by Alexandra Arenes, Axelle Gregoire, and Frédérique Aït-Touati, her paintings embrace a new cartography of living beings. Rather than dividing space into territories, each object and animal on Earth charts its own path, organically shaping space through movement and use. Seeliger attempts to depict these intersecting pathways through her painterly crossroads of gestural layering, interconnection, and traces.

 Point of Life builds upon an established body of work where investigations of mapping inform collages, paintings, and murals.