statement

Recently, I lost both my parents and was confronted with emptying the possessions that filled the home I inhabited from childhood to adulthood. The psychological and physical impact of this process led me to deepen my painting explorations through diagrams and fragments of a deconstructed and nonsensical space with shifting grounds, where everything seems just a little unbalanced and shaky -- perhaps even futile. It is through referencing the traditions of geometric abstract painting that I arrive at this emotional landscape of missing pieces, inconsistency, and loss. The malformed cubes that float in space as if emerged from the wreckage, and often as if detached from home base, are receptacles for all that is left behind.

My work encompasses the tension between containment and spillage, order and collapse, a sense of fragility and loss, and an acknowledgement of opposing forces. The abstract incarnations of this dichotomy have ranged in form from: arrangements of decaying flowers that pay homage to life ("Offerings" 2009 and "Rococo" 2010), scars and visceral words that emerge through the surface of memory ('Scar Project" 1997 and "Words Lost and Found" 2012), water that distorts sounds outside of its receptacle ("Babble" 2000 and "Langscapes" 2005), and architectural motifs that initially appear orderly ("Matrices" 2013 and "Deliberate Apertures and Accidental Enclosures" 2014).

The work values a process-oriented approach, where drawing and painting emerge as equally valid investigations, and the tensions created between the two operate on both formal and psychological levels.

bio

born: 1967

education

Université de Québec à Montréal, MFA, 1997
Concordia University, BFA, 1994

selected awards/honors

Jury prize, Queens Library Foundation and Crossing Art Gallery, 2014
Accepted to the public art program "Intégration des arts à l'architecture", Culture et communication du Québec, 2014
A Grant, (research and creation), Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec, 2007
A Grant, (research and creation), Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec, 2005

selected publications

10th International Drawing Annual, Manifest Press, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2016
"Créer des liens entre l'art et les affaires" (Anne Gagnaire), Montreal, Quebec: Les Affaires, 2014
"Antonietta Grassi; Entendre la Peinture" (Michel Bois), Quebec, Quebec: Le Soleil, 2005
"Antonietta Grassi Fugacious Notations: Babble (and other coded language)" (Maria Zimmerman Brendel), Montreal, Quebec: ETC. Montreal, 2002

selected solo or two-person exhibits

The Harris-Warke Gallery, Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, 2016
Eleanor London Côte Saint-Luc Public Art Gallery, Deliberate Apertures and Accidental Enclosures, Montreal, Quebec, 2014
Warren G. Flowers Gallery, Landscapes, Montreal, Quebec, 2009
Galeria d'arte contemporanea San Giorgio, Astrazione Referenziale, Naples, Italy, 2002

selected group shows

Boston Public Library, High Water, Boston, Massachusetts, 2015
Kunstwerk Carlshutte, Nord Art 2015, Budelsdorf, Germany, 2015
Chromatic, Massivart, Montreal, Quebec, 2015
Crossing Art, The View from Over Here, New York, New York