Carol WainioRCA (born 1955) is a Canadian painter. Her work, known for its visual complexity and monochrome color palette, has been exhibited in major art galleries in Canada, the U.S., Europe and China.[1] She has won multiple awards, including the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.[2]
[edit]Wainio's Season's End (2012) on display at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery as part of the 2016 exhibition Stilled Lives: Works from the Permanent Collection.
Her paintings often reference a variety of sources from fairy tales, medieval manuscripts to the 2008 financial collapse.[5] Wainio's canvases have been described by art critic Emily Falvey as "fairy-tale landscapes littered with the detritus of contemporary consumerism."[6] Her body of work has been compared to such works by American painter Jules Olitski. "The appeal her paintings had came from the same activity of looking that generated their strangeness."[7]
Wainio's first solo exhibition took place at the Yarlow/Salzman Gallery, in Toronto, Ontario in 1982. In 1990, her paintings were displayed in the "Aperto" exhibit at the Venice Biennale, in Venice, Italy. In 2010, Wainio's work was featured in a travelling exhibition, Carol Wainio: The Book, curated by Diana Nemiroff and organized and circulated by Carleton University Art Gallery. This exhibition displays Wainio's interest in the evolution of fairy-tales, the art of the copyist, industrialization, and the narrative power of images.[8] It was on display at Carleton University Art Gallery (2010), the Varley Art Gallery (2011), the Kelowna Art Gallery (2013), the Dunlop Art Gallery (2013), the McIntosh Gallery (2013), and the Galerie de l'UQAM (2014). In 2024, she had her first solo show in New York at Arsenal Contemporary Art Gallery.[9]
