Opening Friday June 26th
RENÉE FORRESTALL
Madonna and Child (Diagonal Composition), 2019
Oil and gold leaf on traditional gessoed panel, 5 ¾” x 6”
DISTILLATIONS
For her exhibition at Zwicker Gallery, Renée Forrestall presents a body of figurative paintings that draw from the visual language of traditional devotional imagery while reinterpreting the icon through a contemporary personal lens. The paintings are executed in oil on copper and/or gessoed panel, materials historically associated with icon painting and early portrait traditions.
Working within these traditional media, Forrestall explores what makes images iconic. While traditional religious icons present a beloved figure, they also present the underlying values that the figure embodies. Forrestall’s often ambiguous figures stem from a variety of sources – part spiritual, part memory, part theatre. Some evoke orthodox icons, while others create ambiguous narrative spaces where gesture, costume, symbols, and atmosphere suggest fragmented stories. These paintings investigate how icons continue to operate culturally – as vessels for mythmaking and reverence. Figure are both subject and symbol. These are not portraits in a conventional sense, but meditations on values. Frames are conceived as integral extensions of the work. Crafting, a value in itself, emphasizes the significance of presentation – acknowledging that how an image is housed and bordered, shapes meaning. Much like historical icons, altarpieces, and devotional panels, frames are structures that house ideas.
Forrestall’s paintings combines technical layering with an intuitive handling of paint. The resulting works feel simultaneously old and contemporary – rooted in historical painting traditions yet culturally of our time
Renée Forrestall
Renée Forrestall is a Canadian artist, educator, and researcher based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Working in oil, egg tempera, gilding, and mixed media, she creates landscapes, portraits, contemporary iconography, and figurative works exploring memory, faith, family, and everyday life. Trained at Mount Allison University and NSCAD University, she pursued extensive studies in anatomy and the human figure through Dalhousie Medical School’s Humanities Program, later serving as Artist-in-Residence with Dr. Jock Murray. She subsequently developed anatomy courses for NSCAD University, has taught figure-related subjects for more than twenty-five years, and undertook forensic art training in Arizona while collaborating with the Nova Scotia Medical Examiner’s Office.
Research and residencies have informed several major bodies of work. A two-year residency at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre with Dr. Kenneth Rockwood and the Alzheimer’s Clinic resulted in paintings now held in the QEII collection and inspired her portraits of the last surviving Canadian First World War veterans, now in the Canadian War Museum collection in Ottawa. Influenced early by her father, distinguished Canadian painter Tom Forrestall, she continues to emphasize observation and craftsmanship, integrating painting with handcrafted shaped panels and frames created in collaboration with her husband, artist Dr. Nick Webb.
For more than four decades, Forrestall has exhibited across Canada and internationally, including in the United States and Taiwan. Her work is represented in numerous public and private collections, and she remains committed to arts education and mentorship while exploring the intersection of historical methods and contemporary art.