“My paintings are, and always have been, attempts not only to focus awareness of colour, but to put colour to use in making cohesive statements that go beyond the visual.” Milly Ristvedt

For Canadian artist Milly Ristvedt, colour is simply magical. And she seems to have intuitively always known that. By age ten she was already painting landscapes—abstractions in multiple shades of green. 

During a remarkable artistic journey that has spanned more than six decades, Ristvedt has used “colour as a working element (limitless, ambiguous, visual, visceral)” to express feelings and ideas. When Ristvedt was in her early twenties, Jack Bush, one of Canada’s most important and influential painters, told the young artist she was ‘ahead of her time.’ Hailed by art critics and collectors as a master colourist, Milly Ristvedt continues to explore and experiment with colour creating her own distinctive artistic voice. In 2023, The National Gallery of Canada acquired three of Ristvedt’s paintings noting that she was finally attaining recognition as the ‘visionary painter she has always been.’

This exciting collection of new compositions were painted over the last three years. They are reminiscent of gestural abstraction works on paper created in the 1970s through the 1990s. Shaping Colour builds on the legacy revealed in her 2023 solo exhibition, which celebrated colour’s powerful, expressive and wild nature. This show reaffirms Ristvedt’s place as a superb colourist who continues to shape, define, and challenge the language of abstraction.

“For myself as an artist, the freedom to explore my own psyche, physicality, and the life around me that informs my work through the elements of painting, particularly the elusive, magical, and fugitive properties of colour, is a gift that I endeavour to pass on.” Milly Ristvedt