APEX: Avantika Bawa

APEX presents a new body of work by Portland-based artist Avantika Bawa. Looking at a singular Portland architectural structure, she presents her ongoing series of drawings, prints, and large panel paintings of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Bawa combines her long interest in architecture and geometry as a subject in her work with a focus on this modernist building of the International Style. Designed by the architectural firm of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, the Coliseum was completed in 1960.

Bawa first began working with the architecture of the Coliseum as a subject in 2015 for the 30th anniversary of the Visual Chronicle of Portland, a city-owned collection of works on paper commissioned by the Regional Arts and Culture Council. The APEX exhibition continues Bawa’s fascination with the Coliseum’s grids, lines, colors, and mass. As a result, the study of the Coliseum has continued to be an examination in abstraction and memory of a place through the inquiry of its form.

In collaboration with Ampersand Gallery, Bawa also will produce a limited-edition artist book to accompany the exhibition.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website 

Image:  Avantika Bawa, Coliseum 01, Graphite and pastel on paper, 2015.