Babylon

Art Gallery of Ontario

Babylon 2005 acrylic on canvas The Donovan Collection, University of St. Michael’s College This massive wallwork is an abstract painting. With it’s bottom edge at bench height, the work is hung in landscape orientation. It is 11 feet or three point three meters tall by 20 feet or six meters wide. The artist creates a spatially complex scene with brushstrokes and rollers. The upper part of the landscape has some bent grey and blue lines forming casual swirls. Below and behind this are straight line brush strokes which pull upwards, grids and rows of lines make layers of abstract structures. These structures (including buildings, spaces of confinement, bridges, and boats) are also explored in many of her other works. This huge composition uses a palette mostly of creamy whites, shades of grays, brown, black with lots of blue background on the left and lots of oranges on the right. There are also pops of greens on both sides. Described from left to right: The artist has painted many vertical lines of relatively equal width in brown and terracotta oranges, some of which resemble, rungs of a ladder and building frames. Under this is a background of grey, then light blue, then white. Moving towards the centre, the colours become more vibrant and the lines are sparser and thinner. The upper part of the image has grey and light blue grids over blue and three bright blue horizontal stripes. in the lower half of this section a cloud of grey loops pour upwards from a sketch of thin horizontal lines which seemingly form the walls of industrial structures. Moving to the right, the top of the next section introduces roller lines (where the paint was thicker) in areas that now repeat. High up is a brown roller mark that goes from vertical to curving right and a red one that is straight up and down. Beside it are light grey and brown swirls over an orange background. The lower part of this section is streaked with drips of paint from above. It has an arch and layers of knots of green, choral and burgundy. Thick dark brown vertical lines descend from them. The farthest right section has a light grey swirl against a dark grey background. The lower right corner of the work has an abstract structure resembling a cargo boat hull in brown and black which is highlighted with light grey. End of Audio Description. Exhibition label text: Thomasos continued to develop her artistic vocabulary in the mid-2000s. This work reveals the new ways in which she experimented with line, structure, and colour. The recognizable grids from her earlier work are gone, but the dense matrix of brushstrokes creates the effect of a packed, urban space. References to the language of graffiti are present, and the canvas appears to vibrate with the infrastructure and energy of a city. Biblical references also recur in Thomasos’s work, and this work’s title may be a direct reference to the troubled and immoral Mesopotamian city that reappears throughout the Christian Bible. End of Exhibition label text.