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Artist reflects on current state of the world with latest exhibition

A Brief History opens at the Kelowna Art Gallery this week
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Howard Podeswa, Watching Goya’s Collosus In My Sorels, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 91.4 x 121.9 cm, Weisz Family Collection. - Credit: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the artist.

A solo exhibition is making its way from Toronto to Kelowna this week.

Artist Howard Podeswa’s A Brief History opens at the Kelowna Art Gallery this week. The large-scale paintings that make up this show were originally shown at the Koffler Gallery in Toronto, according to the Kelowna Art Gallery.

In recent years, as both world and personal events seemed to steer towards turmoil, Podeswa reflects on the current state of the world.

A Brief History expresses an end-of-times cosmology inspired by artistic and scientific visions. Derived primarily from Dante’s allegories of the afterlife in the Divine Comedy and Stephen Hawking’s quantum theories, Podeswa’s poignant images also re-interpret iconic works by Pieter Breugel the Elder and Francisco Goya, according to the gallery.

These compositions build upon intricate layers of personal memories and historical references, as well as recent news images of natural disasters and social upheavals, to convey a complex meditation on the human condition.

Curated by Mona Filip for the Koffler Gallery in Toronto in 2016, A Brief History is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with essays by Mona Filip, John Bentley Mays and a conversation between artists Howard Podeswa and Stephen Andrews.

The exhibition will be shown from Nov. 11 to Jan. 7.

Howard Podeswa: A Brief History will be on view from November 11, 2017 to January 7, 2018.