Window Series II
Toby Graser
Mixed media
24.25 x 18 in.
Value: $875.00
Rental per month: $17.00
To describe Toby Graser's work over the past thirty years as genuinely expressive, as work which conveys visual strength and as work which flows from within, would appear to be quite accurate. Toby claims that for her, "the true importance of art lies in the realm of the imagination and of feeling . . . trying to make visible what is felt as an urge, a sensation, an emotional response. The challenge is to create a work that is complete enough to convey to the viewer a clear and direct image, but to have that image function not as an end but rather the beginning of a continuing aesthetic experience."
Graser always works in series, exploring the imaginative possibilities of a particular combination of shape, colour and texture. In recent years, she has been drawn to collage "for its power to express the sense of something beneath the surface, a peeling away of another dimension, another time, another life." As a visual artist, Toby Graser works hard, and over the past thirty years she has had more than forty solo exhibitions of her work. A major retrospective of her work toured Canada between 1992 and 1995. She has participated in countless group exhibitions, exhibiting extensively in the Maritimes, as well as in the rest of Canada and in New York. Toby Graser's work has been the subject of numerous publications over the past two decades. Her work is found in many public collections: The Beaverbrook Art Gallery, The Department of External Affairs in Ottawa, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the New Brunswick Museum. In addition, she is represented in more than sixty corporate collections in North America and Europe.