Trinidad and Tobago’s patron saint of modern art

Denyse is coming home to the AGO this fall

 

By Stephen Weir Early in October the Art Gallery of Ontario is presenting the first major retrospective exhibition of the late Trinidadian-Canadian artist Denyse Thomasos. She is considered one the finest painters to emerge in the 1990s.

The exhibition is entitled Denyse Thomasos: just beyond and is co-organized by the AGO and the Remai Modern art gallery in Saskatoon. 

“Thomasos had a singular style that employed abstraction as a means to explore contemporary issues of race, the architecture of confinement and our complex relationships to space and place, and the environment” said the AGO in a recent release about the coming show.  Denyse Thomasos: just beyond is co-organized by the AGO and Saskatoon’s Remai Modern contemporary art gallery.

Born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, Thomasos was raised in Toronto and spent most of her professional career in Philadelphia and New York City. Thomasos earned a BA in Painting and Art History from the University of Toronto in 1987. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 1988 and the following year completed her MFA in Painting and Sculpture at Yale University. 

 

In 2010, Thomasos married filmmaker Samein Priester at St. Basil's Church in Toronto, The couple adopted their child, Syann, in June 2010. Thomasos died suddenly in2012 at age forty-seven, due to an allergic reaction during a diagnostic medical procedure in New York. 

At the time of her death, she was at the height of her career, with major museum shows, New York and Toronto gallery representation, and many prestigious awards.The artist whose epic paintings incorporate imagery from a range of sources, including Caribbean textiles, historic slave ships, industrial shipyards, graveyards, villages and maximum-security prisons.  

Despite her passing interest in her art continues to grow. Last fall the McMichael Canadian Art Collection had its own groundbreaking exhibition of her works.