Additional Images

Provenance:

Courtesy of the artist; Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; TrépanierBaer, Calgary.

Installation Photo: Courtesy of Nicholas Metivier Gallery.

The Work & Artist Bio

As with the physicality of her sculptures in concrete, wood and fiberglass, Jen Aitkens’s drawings carry a like presence. Untitled Drawing 119, 2022, is beautifully tactile to the eye. The visible lines are echoed in a delicate tracery of other lines that sit just below the surface. It’s as if the drawing registered a memory of its own making. Neither inside nor outside, the lines and the pentimento are satisfyingly enigmatic, and stately.

Jen Aitken was born in Edmonton, Alberta in 1985 and grew up in Toronto. She completed her MFA in 2014 at the University of Guelph, Ontario, and her BFA in 2010 at Emily Carr University, Vancouver. Aitken received a Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Award in 2021, and the Hnatyshyn Foundation and TD Bank Emerging Visual Artist Award in 2017. In 2022, Aitken was the inaugural RBC Emerging Artist in Residence at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. She was commissioned by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, to create a site-specific installation for their 2020 “Women to Watch” exhibition. Aitken presented her first major institutional solo show at The Power Plant in Toronto in 2023, titled “The Same Thing Looks Different.” Her large-scale public sculpture commission was installed at the new headquarters of the National Bank of Canada, Montréal, in 2023. Aitken’s work is in public collections across Canada, including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. She lives in Toronto. Jen Aitken is represented by Nicholas Metivier, Toronto and TrépanierBaer, Calgary. Her work has been the reviewed in Mousse Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Esse, Border Crossings and Art Forum. A catalogue of her work was published by The Power Plant to accompany the exhibition “The Same Thing Looks Different.”

Jen Aitken, Border Crossings Issue 163, 2023

Making in the Not-Knowing, Border Crossings Issue 148, 2018

Embodied Confusions, Border Crossings Issue 132, 2014

Artist's Website

Nicholas Metivier Gallery

TrépanierBaer Gallery