New Exhibition: Theme and Variations, 15 May – 3 July 2021

Paintings by Edmundston NB artist, Owen Munisamy

The Andrew & Laura McCain Art Gallery is pleased to be hosting an exhibition of paintings by a young painter working in Edmundston, NB, Owen Munisamy.

The exhibition titled Theme and Variations, is a collection of watercolour and acrylic paintings created between 2016 and 2021. Born in a musical family in Europe and having received his artistic training in England, Munisamy currently works in Edmundston, New Brunswick.

This exhibition is delighting an audience who willingly integrate their own humanity with technology on both minor and major scales.

Featured in the most recent edition of Created Here Magazine, Munisamy explores a form of abstraction that blends biological, suggestively human elements (which might remind you of the sculptures of British artists Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth) with the geometrical, hard-edged shapes of contemporary technology. In vivid and bold colour, Munisamy creates variations on a theme of collapsing and exploding spheres suspended on illusory planes, within expansive atmospheres and accompanied with surprising allusions to both art and the real world. At any point the artist’s imagery can transport us to the microscopic or to outer space. Another influence on the artist was Salvador Dali and if you can remember his famous melting clock, you are well on your way to envisioning Munisamy’s biomorphic inventions.

Coming from a family of musicians, Munisamy looked to music for inspiration and particularly at the sculptural forms of wood and brass instruments and their intricate mechanisms. Tree trunks, bicycle wheels, telescopes, lines, wedges, and the unexpected can all be discovered in these enigmatic paintings.