Essays + Reviews
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Abstract modern meets found art in Shift Twist, Lindy Fyfe's fabric montages. An extension of a painting practice that has already earned her a major retrospective at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Fyfe's new show at Verso ... » Read More It is possible that Lindy Fyfe's imagination lives in the Arcadian glade that Henri Matisse envisioned in his pivotal 1904 painting, Luxe, calme et volupté. Tellingly, the canvas was titled after a line from a visionary Baudelaire poem in his 1857 book of verse, Les Fleurs du mal, and was one of the first of a series of works that endeavored to picture idyllic utopias. ... » Read More Lindy Fyfe is an artist whose work fits within certain dynamic strategies that connect contemporary drawing and painting to postmodernism as well as to certain traditions of modernism. Just as with other artists now, Fyfe is rooted in particular ideas and practices of the non-objective that she has taken up, made her own, and then forgets as she practices. ... » Read More 
Lindy Fyfe, installation view of 'Confluence,' her solo exhibition at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa.
[...] Down south at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Toronto painter Lindy Fyfe has installed Confluence, her first major show at a public gallery. Fyfe’s an abstract artist and has utilized two adjoining spaces within the gallery to mount two very different bodies of work. The lower of the spaces is given over to her paintings, works in which a kind of geometric abstraction meets up with abstraction of the more expressionistic variety. That’s a vast oversimplification of Fyfe’s work and really doesn’t do it justice, but the short version of things is that these paintings are overshadowed by the series of works collectively entitled Interweaves in the upper gallery space. Fyfe’s been working directly with textiles, taking the bold and colourful geometric patterns of knit fabrics used for articles of clothing and stretching them, deforming the patterns, and juxtaposing them against other patterns, then mounting all of it over canvas stretchers. It’s bold and visually insistent work, and a reminder of the longstanding parasitical relationship between visual art and fashion. » Read More Flow
by Kimiko Hong in BITS, Issue 07, September 1, 2004  |