Art Toronto 2020

Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to announce our participation in Toronto's 21st annual contemporary and modern international art fair. This year, Art Toronto will truly be Canada’s art fair. Looking beyond the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Art Toronto 2020 will feature a strong online presence including virtual exhibitions, curated collections, talks, tours and more. This will be complemented by programming in galleries and museums across Canada, focused in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal.

In conjunction with our exhibitions Firmament: Stephen Andrews & Daniel Gruetter, and FASTWÜRMS, #turtle_kin_in_kind, Paul Petro Contemporary Art will hold the following virtual programming for Art Toronto 2020:


Virtual Exhibition Tour with Stephen Andrews

Stephen Andrews and Daniel Gruetter host an intimate tour of their exhibition Firmament, October 16 - November 14, at Paul Petro Contemporary Art. The exhibition is comprised of six night sky paintings and a suite of ceramic Moon Jars. According to Andrews, “the paintings can be read as both abstractions and as charts, with different registers of time at play. The individual brush strokes measure out the time of their manufacture like grains of sand in an hourglass. A shooting star’s brief trip through our atmosphere doesn’t even manifest against the backdrop of cosmic time. We barely have time to see it ourselves. When you look up into the heavens the twinkling light has arrived for our pleasure from vastly different moments. One star's light might be 10 million light years old while another star in the same constellation could be twice as old, yet here they are simultaneously in our present. To make sense of it all we ascribe meaning to the stellar patterns of the heavens and use those fabulistic inventions to explain ourselves to ourselves. We imagine destinies are written there.”

The Moon Jars are presented with custom wood boxes produced in collaboration with Daniel Gruetter. Andrews has been exploring the ceramic medium over the past ten years, and Firmament marks an occasion for the first large presentation of this work. In the artist's 2015 survey, POV, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, curator Kitty Scott included several ceramic works in discrete locations within the exhibition, and in 2019 at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, a single large terra cotta sculpture was installed at the beginning of Aftermath, an exhibition of Andrews's Iraqi War drawings. Andrews, in conversation with Gruetter, will discuss his process and the methodology behind his newest paintings and ceramics.


Installation Views and rake-in-the-making FASTWÜRMS: #turtle_kin_in_kind

#turtle_kin_in_kind is a feral performance of witchcraft invested in the familiar good health and reciprocal commonwealth of turtles and mxnxkind.

#turtle_kin_in_kind embodies the predictive power of science and the kinship eros of creation, promoting self and social knowledge as the moonshine of new ways of being in the world.

Witchcraft is an epistemology. Knowledge is magic.