Out of Line:Retrospective

Catherine Young Bates has always marked out her own territory. Steeped in the legacy of Canadian landscape painting, with its iconic early images of northern vistas fashioned by the Group of Seven, Bates emerged on the art scene in Montreal at the same time as the avant-garde move to abstraction, and a period of experimentation, growth and reassessment. Yet, while she has flirted with non-figurative art in various forms, her main trajectory for over forty years (1962-2008), has been linked to that lineage of the land. This, coupled with her passion for still life and the figure, attests to the many components that mark her life and art.

The Stewart Hall Art Gallery is pleased to present Out of Line: Retrospective – Catherine Y. Bates, an exhibition that explores the notion of line as a metaphor and theme throughout her lengthy career. Bates is a painter for whom line is both visible and intangible. It is the link between drawing

and painting, the process that gives birth to her art. Out of Line also evokes a sense of uniqueness

and originality, of courage and passion, of pursuing a line of vision that for decades has been deemed

“out of line” with post-modernist concerns. Her richly textured, poetic expressions of specific locales,

whether the Eastern Townships, Georgian Bay, Quebec’s Charlevoix region or the shores of

Newfoundland, are bold statements of time and place.

The over sixty works in this exhibition, selected from each decade, thus provide a visual means

of mapping the conceptual links between abstraction and realism, between line and paint in her

production. And, unlike the ancient Greek myth of Icarus, an on-going theme in her landscapes, the

exhibition proves that Bates is not only determined, but successful in her “flight towards the horizon” -

the most magical line of all.

This exhibition and catalogue, Out of Line, is presented “in tandem” and in collaboration with

the Visual Arts Centre’s McClure Gallery exhibition Out of Line: Monochromes – Catherine Y. Bates

(March 6th – 28th 2009). We would like to thank the artist, Catherine Y. Bates, and Victoria LeBlanc,

director of the Visual Arts Centre, for their enthusiastic support and cooperation in all aspect of this

project.