DENYSE THOMASOS (1964 - 2012)
Tianjin Tower.
Monoprint in oil on Rives BFK paper, 2003. 775x584 mm; 30x23 inches, full margins. Signed, dated and inscribed "monoprint" in pencil, lower margin. Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, New Jersey.Denyse Thomasos was a Trinidadian-Canadian painter known for her large-scale abstractions of urban and architectural spaces. Her complex artworks incorporate themes from many disparate sources including Caribbean textiles, historic slave ships, industrial shipyards, graveyards, villages and maximum security prisons. Thomasos received her MFA in painting and sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1989, after attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1988. In 2003, Thomasos studied Chinese calligraphy at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in Tianjin, China, after receiving a 2002 Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, New York. She won more than twenty awards over the course of her career including a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 1995, a Joan Mitchell Foundation award in 1998 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012. She spent most of her professional career in Philadelphia and New York City. Sadly, Thomasos died suddenly at the age of forty-seven from an allergic reaction during a diagnostic medical procedure. Her work today is in many institutional collections including including Rutgers University, New Jersey, Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, Bank of Montreal, Toronto and Banque Nationale du Canada, Montreal. She was the subject of a recent career retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.