Gabriela Hirt

Gabriela is a full-time German-Canadian artist who came to the West Coast twenty years ago as a professional travel journalist and writer. Drawing from her long relationship with words, paintings often start out with stream of consciousness writing. Large gestural moves, intuitive mark making and a process driven studio practice help her tap into the body’s knowledge extracting the stories that want to be told. Her paintings, often large format, are mostly figurative abstractions, sometimes whimsical and playful, sometimes mysterious or pensive - depending on the day. “I draw inspiration from what touches me - a stranger’s particular posture or a memory. What I am most interested in is our human experience, which to me, essentially, is all about connection and it’s painful opposite: separation.”