Celia Neubauer

Celia Neubauer’s paintings explore the ephemeral beauty and fleeting passage of the serendipitous image. Through the subtractive and additive action of a brush, Neubauer allows her imagery to materialize, bringing out a tenuous play between obliteration and recovery. In her recent series ‘Satellite’ Neubauer casts her inquisitive gaze towards the cosmic sublime to project onto canvas other worlds beyond our own. These striking paintings harken back to the precision of historical Chinese painting and the tenderness of calligraphy under the guise of modernist abstraction. At once familiar and strange, as if we’ve seen them before somewhere, these works are symptomatic of Neubauer’s adeptness at fabricating almost-ambiguous spaces, be they celestial landscapes, heavenly bodies, or clouds exploding in the sky. In other words, they leave us thinking: is that what I think that is? For this reason, she continues to seduce the voyeur that is within us all while quietly reminding us of our frailty and our diminutive place within the larger universe. Neubauer received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at York University and earned a Higher Diploma at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, England and has exhibited her work internationally. Her work is included in the collections of BMO Financial Group, Canada Life, Cadillac Fairview, Four Seasons (Dubai), the Donovan Collection, Hewlett – Packard Canada Ltd., Live Entertainment of Canada Inc., Art Gallery of Mississauga, Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement Board, Tory Tory Deslauriers & Binnington and many private collections. She has taught at Queen’s University; the University of Guelph; the University of Toronto School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and is presently teaching painting and drawing at the Toronto School of Art. Her paintings have been featured in various publications such as Design Lines Magazine and Carte Blanche 2: Painting.