a shadow rolling down your back | Natasha Verbeke
Natasha Verbeke’s paintings of lush gardens and landscapes consider how their often violent histories of creation and occupation can be reimagined as sites of hope and renewal. Drawing from a sieve of art historical sources, she engages in a layered dialogue with the Western canon and its traditions of landscapes, turmoil, and drama—at once acknowledging the artistic proficiency of the “old masters” while critiquing the power structures that underpinned the creation of their work.
Moved by Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time, which offers a poetic and poignant reflection on how gardens may reveal paradoxical histories of care and destruction, opulence and oppression, Verbeke allows traces of this past to surface in contemporary painting. By disrupting subject matter from its original context, she unsettles and reconfigures fixed narratives, allowing historical fragments to take on new meaning in an evolving present.
Natasha Verbeke, a mouth of water (detail), 2025, oil on wood panel, 40.64 x 50.8 cm. Photo by: LF Documentation
This exhibition marks the culmination of two years of work in the University of Guelph’s Master of Fine Arts program. The Art Gallery of Guelph’s annual exhibitions of graduating MFA students are presented in partnership with the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph.
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