Arc

2009

acrylic on canvas

Purchase, with funds from the Women's Art Initiative, 2022

2021/356

Audio description of the work

Hung with its lower edge at bench height, This monumental painting is the only work on this wall. It is 11 feet or almost three and a half meters tall and 20 feet or 6 meters wide.

It is an abstract painting in a landscape orientation.

This vigorous canvas uses a kaleidoscope of patterns. It’s colours consist of black, light green, light blue, dark blue, pink, grey and yellow and will be described using a clock face. At its centre is a pod structure (topped by a little red house) and knots of black. The 8 o’clock to 4 o’clock area is occupied by two mashed together arching pipe-like structures made of grills, grids and black lines over multiple layers of bright colours. Between 2 o’clock and 4 o’clock, it resembles a ladder and then, the hull of a ship. From 4 o’clock to 6 o’clock and filling in most of the centre of the clock face is a mound of abstract human skulls. Some of the skulls closest to centre have an additional layer of a sketch of a face overlaid on them. From 6 o’clock to 8 o’clock is a decaying industrial structure. The four outside corners of the work are repeated variations of coloured rectangles and squares with the top left corner being brightest with a yellow rectangle overlaid by black vertical bars.

End of Audio Description.

Exhibition label text:

This vibrant, eleven-by-twenty-foot painting—the same dimensions as Thomasos’s former East Village studio wall— reveals traces of the artist’s body through swoops, strokes, and drips of paint. This was the largest scale in which the artist worked.

Two massive ribcage-like forms dominate the upper half of the composition. The ribcage—an arc in itself—appears sporadically throughout Thomasos’s work. She subtly infuses her work with personal meaning (once revealing that the ribcage motif symbolizes her father), while simultaneously addressing larger political concerns. She again employs the skull motif in this work, but here she renders the forms loosely and colourfully. Spilling into the foreground and commanding our attention, the skulls represent Thomasos’s commitment to calling out systemic racism and structures of oppression.

End of Exhibition label text.