Transgressive Engagement

The Toronto-based Peak Gallery is the only space in Canada truly offering a unique experience of, cutting-edge art in all its forms. In point of fact, it has earned its reputation though its commitment to diverse programming, the facilitation of alternative and cutting-edge projects, and the promotion of talented young artists.

In recent years Peak Gallery has exhibited at key international events like Toronto International Art Fair, ARCO, MACO Mexico Arte Contemporaneo plus the latest edition of Photo Miami.

It focuses on works with strong conceptual underpinnings and refined aesthetic qualities. The gallery mission statement includes a commitment with immediacy and nowness, and it strives to provide a platform for distinct projects in an international contemporary creative context, at the very moment of their creation.

For this year’s ARCO Peak Gallery is spotlighting three of the artists on its roster, each with their own individual expression. The multidisciplinary group Blue Republic is showing "Speeding (2004-2006)". The work depicts a miniature of chaotic urban environs where the future is being built from the waste materials of the past. Concerned with the current reality, over and above issues of pure art. The artist imbue their work with a moral subtext designed to trigger off a philosophical reflection on the dizzying changes in history, unbridled urban development and decadent society we live in. Their critically acclaimed work has gone on show at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Galerie Julio Gonzales in Paris and CCA, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw.

The other two artists Peak Gallery has brought with them are Lyn Carter (Canada) who builds sculptures from dollar store plastic plates and platters she ‘skins’ or upholsters in patterned fabrics, interacting all the elements in a decontextualisation that complicates their domestic familiarity. Meanwhile the roots of the work by Raffael Antonio Iglesias (El Salvador, 1969) are embedded within the diverse combinations of his urban Latino cultural background, hybridizing the elements and esthetics of automobile art, tattoo art and Latin-American poster, as well as animation.

about the exhibition