Kardosh Contemporary at Marion Scott Gallery is pleased to announce a major exhibition of works by Ann Kipling, one of Canada’s most distinguished artists. Opening October 13th and continuing through November 17th, Accumulations: 50 Years of Drawings by Ann Kipling will comprise 41 works on paper by the Falkland, BC-based artist. The exhibition will include portraits, landscapes, tree studies and several works from the artist’s acclaimed series of goat drawings, demonstrating the major themes of Kipling’s distinctive graphic expression. Encompassing images produced betweens 1962 and 2018, viewers will have a unique opportunity to experience the evolution of Kipling’s drawing-based practice across a 56-year period.

Known for a distinctive visual language that combines elements of abstraction and realism, Kipling has forged a unique artistic identity through her commitment to drawing as a medium and practice. The exhibition features two separate series of tree studies, produced in 1968 and 1981 respectively. In these monochromatic works, marks accumulate over the paper’s surface to define nature’s volumes, resulting in images that are at once delicate and atmospheric. Produced en plein air, Kipling’s drawings are concerned with capturing the transitory effects of light, contrasting formal density with sparseness.

The exhibition also features older and newer landscapes. In a series of large-format drawings from the late 1990s, Kipling portrays the treed valleys and mountain slopes that surround her studio in the British Columbia interior. Made up of marks in ink in a variety of graphic shapes, these meditative panoramic images explore the notion of scale, suggesting an affinity with traditional Chinese landscape drawing. By contrast, Kipling’s more recent landscape drawings, produced on smaller sheets of paper, are comparatively spare, dynamic in their minimalism. In some, Kipling has combined drawing with delicate watercolour washes, giving the intimate images a new tonal complexity. In other works, she has used coloured ink in combination with conventional black to render the land and its vegetation.

The exhibition includes several works from Kipling’s well-known series of goat drawings. Produced between 1989 and 1990, these energetic images record not just the forms but also the movements of their ruminant subjects. Drawn on earth-coloured paper, Kipling’s pastel and Conté works bristle with expressionistic energy, differing in sensibility from her quieter, more contemplative landscapes. A related series of large human portraits from 1990 are similar in approach. Based on the artist’s friends and acquaintances, these multifaceted movement-filled works are being publicly shown for the first time.

Another highlight of the exhibition is an ink, gouache and watercolour image of a forest from 1962. One of only two known extant works from this early period, Forest Study was produced following Kipling’s relocation from urban Vancouver to Lynn Valley, a wooded community situated along the city’s mountainous North Shore. Deeply influenced at the time by German Expressionism and the works of Paul Klee, Kipling developed a unique language of abstract forms as a means of representing the densely vegetated environment. The result is a singular interpretation of a classic BC theme: the dense coastal forest.

Born in 1934 in Victoria, British Columbia, Ann Kipling lives in Falkland, a small community in the province’s interior. She graduated with honours in 1960 from the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art and Design). Kipling has had numerous solo exhibitions, including a mid-career retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1995. In 2004, she was the first recipient of the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Kipling’s drawings and prints are included in public and private collections in Canada and abroad. Her works in currently featured in A Curator’s View: Ian Thom Selects, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery until March 17, 2019. Accumulations: 50 Years of Drawings by Ann Kipling is her second exhibition with Kardosh Contemporary at Marion Scott Gallery.