Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to present OGOPOGO, an exhibition of paintings by Canadian-born artist Brent Wadden. On view from January 26 to March 4, the works on view are composed of woven fibers mounted on canvas, complicating the painterly notion of surface and reconsidering the concept of the handmade.

“Brent Wadden’s textile paintings exist in the balance between pre-meditation and chance, modernist abstraction and craft, ritual and intuition,” said Lucy Mitchell-Innes. “We are proud to present these new works in Wadden’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.”

Trained as a painter, Wadden began weaving in 2004 while living in Berlin and has grown increasingly skilled with the loom. Using the grid structure of weaving as a starting point, Wadden’s geometric compositions evoke feelings of monumentality and expansion, movement and balance.

Wadden’s deliberate use of the word “painting” to describe his woven works hints at aesthetic debates surrounding the hierarchy of art forms. He emphasizes the difficulty (and, perhaps, impossibility) of maintaining explicit distinctions between high art and craft — the cultural and the industrial — in a time when the qualities that define the privileged labor of the artist are no longer clear cut. Wadden’s work disrupts gender binaries that have persisted in a medium traditionally relegated to the domestic domain.

The 8 new works featured in this exhibition demonstrate the artist’s exploration of the notion of symmetry. Many pieces on display belong to a pair — works that are nearly a mirror image of each other, but with slight variations. Wadden offers two different versions of a color study, allowing room for open contemplation and perspective.