The Toronto Heliconian Club honours Canadian artist Claire Wilks with a Salon given by Sarah Milroy (see June 2 event listing) and an exhibition of works by Wilks, at Heliconian Hall from June 2 to June 29, 2022. The exhibition will be a rare opportunity to see twenty-five works by Claire Wilks on loan from private collections. The exhibit includes brush drawings in tousche, works in conté crayon and monoprints.

The exhibit will be open to the public on the listed dates. Admission is free.

ABOUT THE CURATOR: Christian Bernard Singer, Canadian artist, curator and educator, was born in Paris and raised in New York City. Curator of over 50 exhibitions, including three major retrospectives, Singer has always sought to champion artists who push boundaries, materially and conceptually.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Claire Wilks (AKA Weissman Wilks, 1933-2017) “was able to convey the human emotional experience from love and compassion to loneliness and pain. She was also known for portraying the eroticism of the human body – male and female.” ~ the Canadian Jewish News.

“Her works impose themselves on the eye of the beholder through the force of her autonomous line…” ~ Il Gazzettino di Venetzia.

“My continued use of the woman as figure has no political or moral connotations: the female form has been and is my line, the line lives in the brain of my finger, and I do not know who that woman is from monoprint to monoprint until the line has defined itself, has found its form. In other words, I believe an aesthetic quest, more intuitive than reasoned, precedes all moral, philosophical, or political implications in any drawing, which is why I would never pretend to have anything to say in a philosophical, moral or political way: I don’t have the vocabulary; my vocabulary is my line seeking a form that will say all that needs to be said, if you can read it…” ~ Claire Wilks

Image: Claire Wilks, The Thinking Heart: The Etty Drawings (Series) "Jews in the Desert", on loan from Sandra and Ken Freed, Omaha