Shirley Wiitasalo

Born in Toronto, where she still lives, Wiitasalo has been exhibiting her paintings since 1973. Her exhibition history is lengthy and includes venues all over Canada as well as in Switzerland, Japan and New York. Barry Schwabsky has commented that the fascination of her fugitive, layered paintings resides “precisely in their resistance to one’s confidence in knowing what is offered to be seen...A painting that is neither abstract nor representational, in which the significance of the things glimpsed in it seems to resist articulation may well be called elusive....Its emergent qualities come out only in the chemical bath, as it were, of sustained attention. In the painting Clear, the clarity of this whiteness is inflected by two layers of, not imagery exactly, but what might be called imagistic activity.”

MSVU exhibitions