Gary Taxali at Drabinksy Gallery
| Hello,
I will be showing some paintings and small works in the Project Room at Drabinsky Gallery in Yorkville (Toronto). The opening is this Saturday from 2 – 5 pm, I hope to see you there. Thanks, Gary
And now for something completely different… we welcome Gary Taxali to the Project Room at Drabinsky Gallery. Drabinsky Gallery is pleased to present a discrete collection of Taxali’s distinctive paintings on board, in a show called Originals. Gary Taxali, an artist and professional illustrator, is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art (1991). A fabulously successful illustrator with clients such as Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Esquire, and Bonny Doon Vineyard, Taxali immediately began showing in exhibitions and galleries throughout North America and Europe as well as undertaking to return to his alma mater and assume an Assistant Professor at the renamed Ontario College of Art and Design. His work “has a wonderful printmaking-meets-subversive style” that incorporates vintage-like cartoon imagery with words and letterforms laced with humour. He often draws and/or paints on the inside covers of discarded text books and vintage novels, as if his scribbles were the casual doodlings of a restless mind. Seemingly playful and gentle, his vintage world of nostalgic innocence packs an observant wallop about the peccadilloes of our times. “The work of Gary Taxali takes a basically juvenile bibliophilic impulse – doodling in the leaves of borrowed books – to a more artistically sophisticated level. The books he appropriates aren’t the precious kind one sees fashioned into delicate, romantic assemblage works but the thick, hardy sort that fill high school libraries and suffer the consequent abuse. He arranges their covers and pages in grids of varying sizes and embellished these grids with an entertaining cast of cartoonish characters, random words and phrases, and icons of one sort and another. There (sic) is an appealing sense of play, drawn from childhood but supported by a mature iconographic sensibility.” -Holly Myers, Art Critic, The Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2005 Gary Taxali produced a special edition of The Toy Monkey, his first vinyl toy, at the request of The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The Whitney Museum gifted a limited edition Gary Taxali print to each of their top donors at their annual fundraising Art Party. He is currently preparing for a two person show this June of mixed media works on paper and aluminum at Iguapop Gallery in Barcelona, Spain. For more information please contact My Johansson-Ganjoo
122 Scollard Street Toronto, ON M5R 1G2 T: 416.324.5766 |
