Midnight Supper

Marie Finkelstein is a Toronto artist who has exhibited in both solo and group shows in Toronto and Ottawa. She appeared in fall 2009 as one of the selected artists on the television series "Star Portraits", and has recently completed a commissioned work for Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto. Marie studied art in Montreal where she was born and raised, and in Banff, Boston and Toronto.

Midnight Supper is a series of paintings of a supper party, in a contemporary condominium overlooking Toronto, viewed from different perspectives around the table. The paintings emphasize the dramatic lights and darks both within and without the room. The glowing candles illuminate a table laden with food and wine, highlighting some figures and casting others in shadow. The lights are reflected against the large picture windows, juxtaposed against the cold city lights flickering in the black winter night outside, a world excluded, but present just beyond the window panes.

This series constitutes a natural progression from her two previous series:
Peoplescapes: Social Interactions is a series of paintings of anonymous crowds of people at leisure in various outdoor settings, in which the abstract patterns of sunlight and shadow mirror the shifting kaleidoscope of relationships in modern life. Chez Brasserie Bofinger: 17.05.08 narrows the focus to the diners at a Parisian restaurant, over the course of a single evening, capturing the same patrons from different perspectives. Their relationships appear to shift in the play of light from the chandeliers as it reflects off the polished brass and silverware, creating abstractions that at once distort, reveal and mask the subjects.

Midnight Supper focuses exclusively on one group of subjects, relating one to another in a domestic space. In this series, the abstractions and distortions created by the play of light and shadow are exaggerated to heighten the atmosphere surrounding the midnight supper and those gathered together to share warmth, light and sustenance, protected from the dark and cold outside their magic circle. The paintings in Midnight Supper, as in the previous series, look at human connections in modern life - intimate, varied, and ultimately mysterious to the outsiders looking in.