Milly Ristvedt (born 1942 in Kimberley, B.C.), also known as Milly Ristvedt-Handerek,[1] is a Canadian abstract painter.[2] Ristvedt lives and paints in Ontario, where she is represented by the Oeno Gallery.[3] A monograph covering a ten-year retrospective of her work, Milly Ristvedt-Handerek: Paintings of a Decade, was published by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in 1979.[4] In 2017, a second monograph was published by Oeno Gallery which included a survey of paintings from 1964 through to 2016, Milly Ristvedt, Colour and Meaning : an incomplete palette.
Education
Ristvedt studied at the Vancouver School of Art from 1961 to 1964,[5] and later attained a master's degree in Art History from Queen's University, with her thesis, Reinhardt, Martin, Richter: Colour in the Grid of Contemporary Painting.[2][6]
Career
Ristvedt began her art practice in Toronto in 1964 and had her first exhibition there in 1968 with the Carmen Lamanna Gallery.[2] Since 1968 Ristvedt has had more than fifty solo exhibitions, including a travelling ten-year survey exhibition in 1979 organized by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.[2] She has been featured in multiple publications including Abstract Painting in Canada (Nasgaard, 2007).[2][3] In the book Canadian Art in the Twentieth Century, the art historian, Joan Murray writes of Ristvedt's technique of creating tension between vibrant borders and interior spaces of color fields, and "grid-like images frosted with color and texture."[7] According to cultural critic, Elsbeth Cameron, an aspect of Ristvedt's historical importance was her use of non-objective art and in doing so, she "proved that women were capable of using a "male" art form...to express a distinctive voice."[8]
