Pearl Van Geest has exhibited her work extensively since graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1996. As well as exhibiting at Engine Gallery, recent solo exhibitions include Other World at Transit Gallery, Hamilton; Incident Horizon at Harbinger Gallery, Waterloo; Of Possession at the Cambridge Galleries (2008); Love on the Rocks at James Baird Gallery, Pouch Cove, Newfoundland (2007), and Eat Me and Sugar Bush at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto (2006).
Although born and raised in Canada she spent the better part of the 80’s working and traveling in Africa (Nigeria and Zimbabwe) and India. Her work is informed by these experiences as well as her studies in Biology and Science (BSc. 1980), a deep love of nature and the natural world and a passion for art, contemporary and historical.
Pearl’s work explores a line of inquiry that she has been exploring since graduating from art school; one that concerns questions that arise about the nature of reality and the natural world, our connection to it and the place of painting within this context. She is interested ways in which people approach these questions and the play between them: through myth, philosophy, human physiology and the spiritual.
Pearl’s work is part of the Canada Council’s Art Bank Collection. She was shortlisted for the RBC Painting prize in 2003 and was included in the Magenta Foundation’s recent publication on Canadian painters, Carte Blanche: Vol. 2. She would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.
The paintings from the series Love on the Rocks at Engine Gallery were made during a summers’ long residency by the North Atlantic Ocean at Pouch Cove Newfoundland. The abstractions from Love on the Rocks are very much a record of a time and a place and are a distillation between careful observation and sublime abandonment, particular reflective choices and intuitive mark making and mark absorption in the natural world and in the act of painting.
About this work, Gary Michael Dault wrote, “There are seven big abstract paintings in Pearl Van Geest’s exhibition – which is called Love on the Rocks. What ever private emotional agonies may tincture these gorgeous, quintessentially guileless abstractions, most of the chromatic joy engendered by these pictures must surely be attributed to Van Geest’s unabashedly sensuous love of pigment and its disposition on canvas.”
