Brigitte Radecki begins her paintings with forms arrived at through methods of chance and by doubling, repeating and “flipping” forms. By randomly dripping house paint on the floor and then finding images within the splatters, she obtain forms that often refer to nature but are abstract and so always open and ready to be interpreted by a viewer. Radecki then photographs, copies and reproduce the forms she finds on the floor in various sizes and colours. Subsequent to this mechanical process, she meticulously paints between the lines of the splatters that have been traced onto a canvas surface and so achieve a perceptual ambiguity where figure and ground can flip back and forth. Says the artist of her work, “My paintings always begin with small gestures of chance.”

Recently she started using another reproductive mechanism—laser cut stencils and spray paint.  Although there is a strong sense of uniqueness to the work, there is no single “original” that is tied to her own history or emotions and they can thus be reproduced and are open to an endless number of interpretations and possibilities as to size, colour and mood and can take the circumstances of the people living with them into account.

Radecki has shown her work throughout Canada and Europe.  She has had several solo exhibitions in Montreal, Quebec, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art and has participated in several group exhibitions  in Quebec as well as in  Kamloops, British Columbia,  Erfurt, Germany,  Metz, France, Sackville New Brunswick and the  Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Ontario.  She has been a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et desLettres du Quebec and was represented by Galerie Christiane Chassay in Montreal for twenty years. Her work is in private as well as corporate, and public collections such as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Courtesy of the Artist