May 5, 2006
For Immediate Release
SPENCE GALLERY presents The Spring Collection
In keeping with the blossoming season, Spence Gallery presents a collection of flowers from three artists – Riziki Kateya of Tanzania, Kelvin López from Cuba and Toronto-based Ilyana Martínez. The exhibit brings together each artist’s perspective on the season’s beauty. This celebration of colour creates a brilliant bouquet to be enjoyed year round.
Riziki Kataya, a Maasai artist, paints flowers from the mountains of Tanzania. As the country’s only botanical illustrator, she is involved in documenting the rich and rare plant life in the region. Using watercolour and pencil, her work demonstrates the crisp detail and intense colours of her botanical subjects. Riziki is being groomed by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, receiving ongoing support from one of its leading illustrators and teachers. The Garden hosted an exhibit of her work in England.
Kelvin Lopez is a graduate of Cuba’s renowned Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana. Using acrylic on canvas, Kelvin paints bold flowers that can be interpreted, like recurrent dreams. Their colour and formal representation appear to erase time, place and action abstracting his works into the plane of the merely visual and aesthetic. Kelvin has shown extensively in Cuba and the United States and will soon be doing exhibits in Europe.
Ilyana Martinez is a graduate of both the Nova Scotia and Ontario College of Art and Design. Her current series, entitled “Urban Planting” reflects a fusion of two contrasting worlds – the natural realm is alive with endless growth, sprouting seeds, clinging roots, plants, and dirt, while the built environment of the city is fabricated with structures, wires, grids, concrete, and geometry. In her watercolour paintings, organic and constructed shapes emerge and dwell beside and within one another to form imagined places.
Please join us for The Spring Collection from May 11, 2006 – June 18, 2006. A wine and cheese reception will be held on Saturday, May 27 from 2 – 5 p.m. with Ilyana Martinez in attendance.
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SPENCE GALLERY, located in Mirvish Village, is Toronto’s only gallery that showcases contemporary expressions of Caribbean, Latin and African culture. The gallery was founded to share culturally diverse artistic expressions. It provides a taste of contemporary art of Caribbean, Latin American and African artists and the Diaspora. It is dedicated to diversity and celebrates the cultural influences of the artists.
For further information contact: Joan Spence, Director – 416 795 2787
Gallery Hours
Wednesday – Friday 5 – 8 pm
Saturday and Sunday 12 - 6 pm