Steph Krawchuk - TEXT/URE
Reception: Saturday October 25, 2 - 4 PM
October 25 - November 29
Art Placement is pleased to present TEXT/URE, a solo exhibition of new work by Saskatoon-based painter Steph Krawchuk. This is Krawchuk’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and her most formally expansive to date. In TEXT/URE, Krawchuk brings together a new body of paintings that speak softly but insistently — in the language of form, in the rhythm of space, in the half-remembered murmur of text fragments. These are not works that tell you what to see; instead, they ask you to look more slowly, to read not for content but for cadence.

Krawchuk’s practice has long explored the vocabulary of abstraction — line, shape, colour, and surface — but in TEXT/URE, that language ventures into new terrain. Letterforms, glyphs, symbols, and shapes appear across several works, offering traces of language that hover between legibility and abstraction. These marks evoke the presence of writing without ever becoming fully readable, functioning instead as visual texture — or text-ure.

Alongside this shift, Krawchuk reimagines how paintings inhabit space. The paintings gather into groupings, constellations of forms and relationships. They lean into each other, echo one another, create pauses and continuities. This is painting not as isolated artifact, but as installation — a choreography of parts across walls, where the space between works is as charged as the works themselves. Rather than treating each painting as an isolated statement, Krawchuk invites viewers to encounter them as fragments in dialogue — where proximity, repetition, and rhythm become central to how meaning is built.

Her characteristic restraint remains: muted colour palettes, simple forms, and finely-tuned surfaces that balance control with spontaneity. Each canvas reveals a slow accumulation of decisions — painted, erased, reworked — where even the subtlest gesture carries weight. Despite their restraint these paintings are alive with tension. Edges fray. Colours push and pull. Shapes settle uneasily, then hold. The surface becomes a site of negotiation between intention and accident, silence and statement, control and the pleasure of letting paint do what it does.

In TEXT/URE, the act of looking becomes a form of reading. But what we read is not a narrative — it is a mood, a structure, a possibility. A whisper of form that speaks, not in sentences, but in the spaces between them. TEXT/URE is a meditation on how abstraction communicates — not through narrative, but through rhythm, structure, and resonance. It is an exhibition that rewards close looking, and where the spaces between works are as alive as the works themselves.