Denyse Thomasos, Jaipur Royal Visit (2007)
If you’re lucky enough to be in the Vancouver area this spring, be sure to stop by the Vancouver Art Gallery to experience a piece from the Canada Council Art Bank in person.
For the last four years, Jaipur Royal Visit (2007), a work by Denyse Thomasos, has been making appearances at art galleries across the country thanks to the Art Bank loan program.
Through pattern, scale and repetition, the painting conveys the vastness of history and events like the transatlantic slave trade, without exploiting the images of those who were most affected.
It’s currently part of a career retrospective organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Remai Modern — Denyse Thomasos: Just Beyond — which brings together over 70 of the artist’s paintings and works on paper.
The piece was previously featured at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, in Kleinburg, Ontario (2021), at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, Ontario (2022), and at the Remai Modern, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (2023).
About the artist
Born in Trinidad in 1964, Thomasos is best known for her large-scale, semi-abstract paintings. She immigrated to Canada in the early 1970s as a child, settling with her family in Toronto.
As a Black person in a largely white education system, she struggled with feelings of isolation and a lack of accessible information about her history and culture. Her need for self-expression drove her interest in painting from an early age.
Thomasos gained prominence in the 1990s, when she exhibited extensively in Canada and internationally. She died tragically in 2012 at the age of 47, at the height of her career.
“I am an abstract painter working with architectural forms that I have documented from my travels through Africa, India, China and South America. Exploring social and political themes of slavery, prisons and colonization, I have used the indigenous forms of caves, bridges, temples and dwellings to construct elaborate prison-like complexes.
These structures transform into many various formations and, in the case of the exhibition Excavations at the Olga Korper Gallery, in 2007, they have taken on the form of a burial ground. Most of the paintings are named after the towns I visited in Rajasthan, India. Jaipur Royal Visit is based on the Rajasthan town, Jaipur, ‘the pink city’ that was painted pink for the royal visit of Prince Albert in 1876.”
– Denyse Thomasos