Leon Phillips
The Matter of Colour

Exhibition text/press release: Paintings that explore the materiality of colour are featured in a new solo exhibition by Leon Phillips at THIS Gallery. Leon Phillips: The Matter of Colour takes as its starting point the physicality of pigment and its intrinsic qualities as a transmitter of colour. Paint, brushes and the artist’s body work together as a colour delivery system to create a choreographic record of movement on the painting’s surface. For Phillips, paintings are investigations into what nonbinary gestures might look like while creating embodied perceptual experiences for the viewer. Included in the exhibition are oil on canvas paintings and gouache on paper paintings. The Matter of Colour opens Saturday, May 7 at THIS Gallery, a new urban art space on Main at Pender. In 2021, Phillips was part of the Mark Rothko Painting Symposium at the Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre in Latvia. Daugavpils is the birthplace of Rothko, the American colour field painter who rose to prominence in the 1940s in New York and became one of the most influential artists of his generation. Phillips’ work was featured in a juried group exhibition and is now in the art museum’s permanent collection. Phillips has been awarded grants from the Vermont Studio Center, the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. He’s also attended international residencies at the Vermont Studio Centre, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. He has a Bachelor of Arts (cum laude) from the University of Saskatchewan and a Bachelor of Environmental Studies from the School of Architecture, University of Waterloo.