Mina Totino
03 Nov - 22 Dec 2006
MINA TOTINO
"Square 1"
Working primarily as a painter, Mina Totino has also produced a number of drawing-based and mixed media works that explore notions of civic identities, atmospheric conditions, serial-production and the study. The fundamental nature of her work is the exploration, through painting, of the relationship between figuration and abstraction, with an overlay of art-historical references and critiques, especially as they relate to ideas of beauty, sensuality and the nature of the sublime.
“The new paintings aren’t exactly abstract and they’re not really figurative either. Rather, they mix up the opposing idioms of painting, offering a counterpoint between the sensuous brushstroke and the representational image... (She is) working through the process of painting itself; adding things by trial and error, putting an element here and then getting rid of it and putting it somewhere else... For such a paint-centric series of works there are a healthy abundance of references: the graph lines in futurecitypast refer to radioactive material in and around Chernobyl; the bear in Square 1 is taken from the accounts of a bear shot in Germany last summer, and the intense green in Square 2 comes from media photographs of oil spill in Squamish (just north of Vancouver).”
© Mina Totino
futurecitypast, 2006
oil on canvas, 207 x 157 cm.
"Square 1"
Working primarily as a painter, Mina Totino has also produced a number of drawing-based and mixed media works that explore notions of civic identities, atmospheric conditions, serial-production and the study. The fundamental nature of her work is the exploration, through painting, of the relationship between figuration and abstraction, with an overlay of art-historical references and critiques, especially as they relate to ideas of beauty, sensuality and the nature of the sublime.
“The new paintings aren’t exactly abstract and they’re not really figurative either. Rather, they mix up the opposing idioms of painting, offering a counterpoint between the sensuous brushstroke and the representational image... (She is) working through the process of painting itself; adding things by trial and error, putting an element here and then getting rid of it and putting it somewhere else... For such a paint-centric series of works there are a healthy abundance of references: the graph lines in futurecitypast refer to radioactive material in and around Chernobyl; the bear in Square 1 is taken from the accounts of a bear shot in Germany last summer, and the intense green in Square 2 comes from media photographs of oil spill in Squamish (just north of Vancouver).”
© Mina Totino
futurecitypast, 2006
oil on canvas, 207 x 157 cm.