57/150: Wanda Koop’s deceptively simple master works

Wanda Koop (1951) is one of Canada’s most distinguished and active artists. Well known internationally, she has two major solo exhibitions in North America this year. She is a painter, video artist and a committed activist who has been bringing art to her community through Art City, a storefront centre she founded in her home base of Winnipeg in 1998.

Koop’s solo exhibition of new work, “Objects of Interest,” is on at Night Gallery, Los Angeles through March 9 (installation view, top of post). Her 2nd solo exhibition, Who Owns the Moon opens at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in April. 

Her works are monumental & mesmerizing

In large-scale paintings and mixed-media events that incorporate video, music and dance, she has fashioned bodies of work that are monumental and mesmerizing. An exhibition of her paintings is as much an environment as an installation.

Koop is an inveterate world traveller, motorcycling through the United States in her youth and taking an ocean freighter up the St. Lawrence Seaway (see a previous Art Junkie post about that journey here). She has also lived in Paris, Rotterdam, Tokyo and New York City.

As a young child, Koop attended Saturday morning art classes at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and continued to receive instruction until she was 13 with the support of the Winnipeg School Division. She graduated from the School of Art at the University of Manitoba in 1973. Koop was later quoted as saying painting was never a choice for her – it was an imperative. 

For over four decades, Koop has made deceptively simple paintings. Their spare, graphic compositions belie many layers of highly calculated, sheer washes of color that cause them to hum, and to engulf their viewer. 

Essay by Cat Kron for the Night Gallery exhibition in 2024

Her paint drips tears

This video is a good summary of Wanda Koop’s artistic approach, including how the paint drips tears.

The daughter of Russian Mennonite immigrants, Koop was born in Vancouver and moved as a young child to Winnipeg, where she has lived ever since. In 1972 while still a student at the School of Art, the University of Manitoba, she was invited to participate in a major exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the inquiry into the nature of painting which engaged her in that early work became the focus of her practice.

Among her numerous recognitions, Koop was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Golden and Diamond Jubilee Medals, and the Japan Fund Award from the Canada Council. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Manitoba and a Member of the order Of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honour. She holds honorary doctorates from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba.

Wanda Koop’s website, here.

Her Instagram, here.

This is No. 57 in 150 Artists, an ongoing series on Canadian artists you should know.