Julie Gladstone is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist working in painting, textiles, performance, video and writing, who lives and works in Toronto. She received her MFA from OCAD University (2022) and BFA from Concordia University, Montreal (2006). Her studio research has been funded by the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship. Notable exhibitions have included the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2024), Redeemer University (2022), the Museum of Jewish Montreal (2020), David Melul Museum Judio in Béjar, Spain (2019), the Department of Canadian Heritage, Toronto (2018), Navillus Gallery (2015), and Walnut Contemporary (2013). Gladstone is a member of the artist collective, Object(ive) Collect(ive), and is also a participant of the feminist artist collective, Entresabanas, in Béjar, Spain. Her work can be found in private and public collections in Canada and abroad.    

 

In this new series of paintings and drawings, she reprises her ongoing investigation into the impermanence of the landscape using an introspective approach she refers to as, “internal sublime”. This is Gladstone’s first solo painting exhibition since becoming a mother, and her first solo exhibition at Emily Harding Gallery.  The work highlights the importance of female experiences and inner life including intimacy, rest, contemplation, emotions and memory.

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Using a research methodology grounded in floatation (sensory augmentation), meditation, and inner sensing, this series takes a plein air approach to the artist's inner world to re-imagine and reclaim the goals of the intimism movement of Bonnard’s "Bather" paintings, defined by critic Camille Marcoux as: "a revelation of the soul through the things painted, the magnetic suggestion of what lies behind them through the description of the outer appearance." Gladstone's studio thus becomes an alchemy lab in which information and stimulus are transmuted into multilayered, gestural, abstract paintings full of transparencies, contrasting colours, jewel like moments, cosmic blackholes and mysterious depths. 

 

With her signature contemporary-sublime aesthetic, expressionistic mark-making and textured, archeological surfaces, the artist has turned her gaze inwards, away from the extreme rain clouds and the urban landscape of previous bodies of work, so as to map and track her internal states and spaces: to create abstract paintings that are at once sublime and intimate.