Well-known White Rock/Surrey painter Elizabeth Hollick’s colourful, whimsical and uniquely provocative work will be highlighted in a new show at Surrey Art Gallery called Body Politic, on view from April 14 to June 10.
Long-celebrated on the Semiahmoo Peninsula for bold, figurative paintings that bring to life local places, stories and characters – including lively exterior murals at the Coast Capital Playhouse and Blue Frog Studios – Hollick gives vent in the newest show to dual fascinations: the architecture and landscape of White Rock, and human anatomy.
In some measure, it’s a follow-up to her 2016 show Body Parts In Unexpected Places at Semiahmoo Arts’ Turnbull Gallery, at South Surrey Recreation and Arts Centre, but it also includes other pieces from her extensive catalogue of work, as well as sections from some of her many sketchbooks.
These particularly relate to her interest in the body and health – prompted by the hospitalization of her late husband, Michael – and, at the time, images she was drawing of architecture and new construction in White Rock.
As she related at the time of the 2016 show, patterns of body structure began to fuse in her imagination with the anatomy of the city she discovered while watching buildings grow from underground excavations, to skeletal construction frameworks, to ultimately fleshed-out buildings.
“Quite a lot of the show comes from these books,” she said at the time of that exhibition. “When I look for things to put in each painting, I find the appropriate sketch.”
Hollick’s signature humour inevitably emerges in her surprising juxtapositions of the privacy of the internal world with the physical development of an increasingly urbanized landscape.
A skeleton holds aloft the roof of a skyscraper in progress; patchwork skin unfurls over the side of a newly built apartment in wry, witty and highly detailed paintings in which scores of workers – both men and women – labour over structures that enclose and include human organs.
One typical painting is “Damaged Heart At The Crossroads,” in which a battered heart lies just under the surface of a project to remove blossoming trees from a city street.
“I wanted this to be all soft and beautiful on the surface, and for there to be open-heart surgery going on underneath,” she said in 2016.
The opening of Elizabeth Hollick: Body Politic will take place on April 14, in a celebration that includes her own artist’s talk at 6:30 p.m., along with concurrent SAG spring exhibitions Flow: From the Movement of People to the Circulation of Information and Ben Bogart: Watching and Dreaming. The gallery is located at 13750 88 Ave. For details, call 604-501-5566 or visit surrey.ca/artgallery.
