Brent Wadden

Working on backstrap and floor looms, Wadden creates his large-scale work by weaving linear and abstract forms that he then stretches over raw canvas. Influenced by folk and Bauhaus textiles, the language and techniques of women quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, as well as painting movements such as Minimalism, Wadden’s pieces balance full and empty spaces, throwing the distinction between high and low into flux and using technical mistakes to progress. His paintings complicate hierarchies of media and disciplines, surfaces and textures with his own woven arrangements.

“Brent Wadden is resolutely an abstract painter. But then everything we view by him contradicts this first impression or in some way complicates our understanding of what it is we’re looking at. We apprehend the made qualities of the work itself; we recognize its materiality; we delight in its appearance. And yet Wadden investigates the potentials of these material and sensorial facts imbuing them with a contemporary relevance that stretches far beyond well-worn and overly familiar discussions.” Nigel Prince, Executive Director of the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.