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Quality is the first norm for art, but its final norm is love and truth, the enriching of human life, the deepening of our vision.

Books

Gabankova, Maria: Body Broken - Body Redeemed

Book Info

Maria Gabankova: Body Broken—Body Redeemed, VISIBILIA series 2, Piquant Editions – Carlisle, 2007.
 
The second volume in the Piquant Editions VISIBILIA series of ‘visual biographies’ features over 40 full-colour reproductions of paintings and installations by Czech-born Canadian artist Maria Gabankova. Introduced by John Franklin, director of the Imago arts organization in Canada.
"Maria Gabankova's facility for rendering the human body in all its strength, grace and range of movement is eerie. These large, complex tableaux with their echoes of biblical narratives and Renaissance compositions are at once beautiful and troubling: tenderness and fear jostle for space on the same canvas. Her contemporary world is seen through the past, and although there are iimages of apocalypse and darkness on her canvases, compassion and humanity dominate. Despite her astounding technical prowess, these are expressive paintings: Gabankova's feeling for the beauy in the everyday—a hand clutching a cloth, a pear on a table—fills these paintings with warmth."
Russell Smith

“Gabankova’s theology, like her art, sounds a wake-up call. It calls us to pay attention to the state of our world and the signs of our times. Nobody who passes by her art can fail to be touched, shaken or, indeed, shocked by the power of her imagery. It is, in one word, wake-up-art. More than that, however, it invites our tired, fragile and broken bodies to the wedding banquet of the Body Broken For You, where we can be fully re-nourished and redeemed.”
Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin