So German!

Cosima von Bonin is a guest of the Goethe-Institut

Cosima von Bonin’s first solo museum exhibition in Canada examines the Cologne artist’s fascination with the sea. Commonly evoked in her works but rarely made explicit, the ocean is an organizing thematic for this show that focuses on a selection of her sculptures from 2000 onwards.

Von Bonin’s cast of textile characters included in the exhibition, from crabs to sharks, present a host of contradictions – approachable creatures that aren’t quite what they seem or don’t behave as we might expect. Weaving together humour and melancholy, softness and hardness, access and exclusion, von Bonin’s sculptures mix with art history, popular culture, music, and craft, while engaging in feminist destabilizations. Appropriately, the deep sea – where von Bonin’s crew ventures – is its own world, little known and remote for us.

Free admission

Cosima von Bonin (born 1962 in Mombasa, Kenya; lives and works in Cologne, Germany) is one of the most influential German artists of her generation. While she has exhibited extensively in Europe, her North American exhibitions have been limited to a survey titled Roger & Out at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007), and a follow-up survey at the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in St Louis titled Character Appropriation (2011). Other significant international exhibitions have included HIPPIES USE SIDE DOOR. at MUMOK, Vienna (2014); Cut! Cut! Cut! for Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2011); documenta 12 in Kassel (2007). Her work was also featured in Make Your Own Life: Artists In and Out of Cologne at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Powerplant Gallery Toronto (2006).

Oakville Galleries is a not-for-profit contemporary art museum, reaching communities in Oakville and wider audiences regionally, nationally and internationally. As a forum for engaging people with the questions that shape us as individuals, communities and cultures, Oakville Galleries draws on contemporary art to facilitate reflection and discovery in unexpected and stimulating ways.

The exhibition is co-curated by Long Island City SculptureCenter Curator Ruba Katrib and Glasgow International Director Sarah McCrory and is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication.