Angela Grossman: Unfolding | West Vancouver Art Museum

Angela Grossmann: Unfolding. On view October 20 to December 12, 2026.

Opening Reception: Tuesday, October 20, 6 to 8 p.m.

Artist Talk: Saturday, October 24, 12 noon to 1 p.m.

Farsi Tour: Saturday, November 7, 2 to 3 p.m.

German Tour: Saturday, November 14, 2 to 3 p.m.

Mandarin Tour: Saturday, November 28, 2 to 3 p.m.

Curatorial Tour: Saturday, December 5, 2 to 3 p.m.

Angela Grossmann paints from an interior record where memory, emotion, and line precede narrative. Situated within a lineage of artists who privilege gesture and interiority over representation, Grossmann nevertheless resists abstraction. The human figure continually reasserts itself—partial, unstable, and deeply present. Her work begins with a contour, a trace that feels discovered rather than constructed. The figures that emerge hover between presence and erasure, suspended in a space where identity is suggested but never fully secured. Grossmann’s figures are not portraits, but fragile, unresolved beings perpetually in the process of becoming or disappearing. What we encounter is not portraiture but presence itself: fragile, shifting, and incomplete. It is in this pendulous space between articulation and disappearance that her figures feel most alive. They’re unfolding.

Through layered brushwork and restless drawing, Grossmann builds surfaces that feel intuitive rather than illustrative. Lines wander, double back, and dissolve. Similarly, her paint is scraped away, thinned, and reworked, allowing earlier marks and photographs beneath to remain visible. Thus, her work floats in a delicate balance—always on the verge of forming or vanishing, drawing the viewer into a process of emotional excavation rather than narrative resolution.

Within all of this lies a remarkable precision. Grossmann’s ambiguity is never accidental; every softened edge, broken contour, and layered revision carries emotional weight. It is through drawing that vulnerability, longing, unease, and introspection are held in suspension. And it is within this suspension that memory is sedimented and identity remains continually in flux. The viewer is not invited to decode a narrative but to inhabit uncertainty rather than resolve.