The controversial Ukrainian-born, Toronto-based painter has been compared to Spanish master Diego Velazquez, while her paintings are often inhabited by seemingly bizzare juxtapositions, territory frequently travelled by the Surrealists

Natalka Huzar in Hamilton

The controversial Ukrainian-born, Toronto-based painter has been compared to Spanish master Diego Velazquez, while her paintings are often inhabited by seemingly bizzare juxtapositions, territory frequently travelled by the Surrealists. One of Canada's leading contemporary artists, she remains an enigma to much of the Ukrainian community, and her painting often shows mixed feelings towards the ethnic group. Husar's new work is being presented in tandem with the traveling exhibition The Phenomenon of the Ukrainian Avant-Garde, 1910-1935, at the Art Gallery of Hamilton from February 14 through April 7.

Larissa Ciupka

Natalka Husar’s new exhibition, Blond With Dark Roots, breaks new ground in exploring the dynamic between dislocation and empowerment. Ranging from a portrait gallery of fictitious post-Soviet immigrant girls to a grand narrative of interconnected tableaux to a playful revision of the standard plots of romance fiction, this exhibition challenges previous formulations of cultural identity. Whereas in the past Husar’s work foregrounded the material paraphernalia of ethnicity, Blond With Dark Roots speaks to us in more subtle and complex ways, through physiognomy and the mutations of signs, textures and effects. The results are visceral and disturbing and play to a seductively wicked and sharp edge.

“Husar is the ultimate visual storyteller. A painter who works like a theatre director, novelist and filmmaker, she has the capacity to lure us into her pictorial space and simultaneously destabilize us,” says AGH Chief Curator Shirley Madill, who put the show together. “Like a good book that you can’t put down, her fictions are believable and her endings ambiguous, thereby drawing us in again and again in the visual feast.”

The exhibition’s tour schedule includes stops at the following venues:

Winnipeg Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Justine M Barnicke Gallery (Toronto), Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery (Owen Sound).

Natalka Husar was born in 1951 in New Jersey. She graduated from Rutgers University in 1973 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and that same year moved to Toronto, where she lives and works.

Husar’s solo shows include: Faces/Facades, 1980, Behind the Irony Curtain, 1986, Milk and Blood, 1988- 1989, True Confessions, 1991-1992, Black Sea Blue, 1995-1996.