Artist Ernestine Tahedl holds gallery shows

October 21, 2020 · 0 Comments

By Mark Pavilons
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative

King’s renowned abstract artist Ernestine Tahedl hasn’t let the pandemic show her down.
Tahedl’s work will be featured at Gallery 133. The exhibit, “Transposition: Music to Painting,” will run Oct. 24 through Nov. 14.
The exhibition includes the most recent paintings by Ernestine Tahedl portraying iconic works by Bach, Brahms, Bruckner and other great composers.
Her music-loving approach to painting is a form of “synesthesia,” the condition in which one sense is simultaneously perceived by another sense. Among composers, synesthesia leads to an association of major and minor keys with corresponding hues, resulting in works such as the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus, the Poem of Fire, scored for piano, orchestra, choir and clavier à lumières or Chromola (colour organ); and A Colour Symphony by Britain’s Sir Arthur Bliss.
While abstract paintings often resemble blobs evoking a Rorschach test or a jumble of lines, “there’s romanticism in my work,” said the King City area artist.
“The complex play with light passing through glass … transforms light onto her luminous canvasses,” added Katerina Atanassova, senior curator, Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada.
Tahedl likes classical music so much she usually names her paintings after works by famous composers. “My love is intuitive; I don’t read music,” she says. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, for instance, inspired six paintings in 2014. “They’re very dark,” she said. They should be, given that the opera, especially the third-act prelude, offers the bleakest portrayal of despair in the entire canon of Western music.
As for her triptych paintings, represented in the exhibition by Bach Trio Sonata No. 6, she says: “The concept of multiple canvases and panels has always fascinated me. It leads me toward the medieval concept of religious paintings and their spirituality. Spirituality and serenity are integral to my work.”
Last year the National Gallery of Zagreb, Croatia, feted her with a retrospective exhibition: a permanent installation of her work reposes at St. Florian Monastery, a landmark of Austrian Baroque architecture near Linz, where her beloved Bruckner is buried under the organ he often played.
Like prolific composers, she uses opus numbers to keep track of her vast output.
“I started in 1980; I’m up to 3,641. My husband says I should stop,” she adds with a laugh.
Tahedl will be at the gallery Oct. 24 from 1 to 5 p.m. Contact the gallery if you wish to attend to check on the COVID-19 restrictions.
For more, visit www.gallery133.com or email info@gallery133.com