BIO Antonietta Grassi’s paintings and works on paper have been featured in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Her work can be found in public, corporate, and private collections, including the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Archives of Ontario and the Museo Civico Di Molise (Italy). She has been laureate of several awards and honours. In 2017, she received a Canada Council Project Grant in Visual Arts for the series Contemplation For Obsolete Objects.
ARTISTIC APPROACH Antonietta Grassi has been committed to the practice of abstract painting for most of her career. Her paintings, which at first appear as hard-edged geometric abstractions, are composed of multi-layered, painted surfaces where the touch of the hand is paramount. Grassi paints layered, intuitively derived forms that are intersected by fine, thread-like lines—creating works where textile, architecture, and painting’s twentieth century history collide. The notion of time is evident not only in the development of surface but is reflected in the themes the artist has been working with: obsolescence, memory and history.
PROJECT Antonietta Grassi’s project is to work on a series of paintings which reflect her interest in the aesthetics and tactility of technological systems. As a painter, she references the codes from modernist abstraction such as the square, the monochrome, the grid and line. Conceptually, she is interested in the connection between the history of computer programming and textile weaving and women’s significant contribution to those histories. She works on multiple artworks simultaneously and moves from work to work to develop a series where each painting relates to the other. The process includes a mix of intuition and seeking precision. The layering of paint for the initial composition is an intuitive process, while the drawing of lines is slow, deliberate and meditative.
