Biography

Rose Lindzon is a Canadian artist who was born in Poland. Since studying Art History at the University of Toronto, she has exhibited in Canada and the United States for over 30 years.

Lindzon has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, and New York. In 1988 Robert Swain mounted a 10 year retrospective in a travelling show that was accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an introduction by Joyce Zemans. Her works have been purchased by major collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, University of Toronto, McMaster University, Art Gallery of Hamilton, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, which is currently coordinating a study of her entire body of work. She also has been included in many private and corporate collections including Hotz (Zurich, Switzerland), Scripps Howard Foundation (Kansas City, MI), Chase Manhattan Bank, and Shell Canada Ltd.

Positive reviews and critical analysis of her work by respected arts and cultural commentators such as Kay Kritzwizer, Joyce Zemans, John Bentley Mays, and Christopher Hume have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers including The Globe and Mail, Arts Canada, The Toronto Star, Artsmagazine, The Montreal Gazette, and Le Devoir.

Passionate about archaeology Lindzon has participated in digs and travelled with archaeologists through Etruria (Italy), Greece, Turkey, Crete, Sicily, and parts of South America. This passion informs her work and since the late 1980s she has been working on multi-media works incorporating pieces of canvas on canvas in order to capture a sense of walls within the works, a peeling away of history, of buried revelations that affect the upper surface as they begin to be exposed from below. After participating in a dig Etruria, Lindzon devoted an entire installation to the Etruscans, which was shown in Montreal and Toronto. Her travels in Greece and Crete resulted in her hand-writing an illustrated book on Minoan and Mycenaean art, architecture, and mythology as well as inspiring many paintings. She also wrote a handwritten illustrated book about her travels in Anatolia (Turkey) in addition to creating another series of work inspired by the history of the region.

The paintings appear pocked and scarred as might an ancient wall; scrapes of history alluding to accidents of persons. Lindzon as a contemporary painter is responding, reaching over time to the beginnings of our civilization. Robert Swain, Catalogue for Rose Lindzon Ten Years

Noted for her use of colour, Lindzon believes that her paintings have a sense of structure, but her freedom of colour dominates.

The reds Lindzon uses are those wise old earth and iron colours that treat the eye everywhere in central Italy. John Bentley Mays, The Globe and Mail

Rose employs various media, but her trademark is her use vivacious, bold, and daring colours. Lindzon’s abstract mode helps her achieve passionate and expressive intensities; her process of personal and spontaneous art infusing surface textures with hidden colours. Paul Lee, Glendon Gallery, York University

Seldom does she (Lindzon) permit either her viewer or herself complacency. Joyous in their colours, the canvases, on closer examination, often reveal juxtaposition of complamentaries which pushes the conventional boundaries of colour relationships. Joyce Zemans, Catalogue for Rose Lindzon, Ten Years