Exclusively at Oeno gallery and for the first time in 50 years, Milly Ristvedt’s landmark ‘Highway paintings’ are available. Canadian painter Milly Ristvedt (RCA) is considered a master abstract colourist. In the spring of 1969, she sat in the back seat of a friend’s car as they drove from Toronto to Montreal. Ristvedt was struck by the dynamic angular and elongated shapes of the multi-lane highway. “On the journey I began to see paintings form in the angular patterns of landscape created by our speed and sharp perspective. I took this memory of shape and the mostly cool colours of the deeply overcast day back to my studio and began to paint them.” Milly Ristvedt At 27, she had already exhibited her work in two solo exhibitions at the prestigious Carmen Lamanna Gallery in Toronto. She shared a studio with the renowned abstract artist, Jack Bush. When Ristvedt returned from her road trip, she painted a series of large canvasses inspired by what she’d seen. The Highway paintings number eight in all. Bush encouraged her to show them to Lamanna but he rejected them. She rolled up the canvasses and stored them. They were never shown. Only three people had seen them. Remarkably, Ristvedt recently found them in her studio. They’d been lost for 50 years. In Highway No. 4, the earthy colours of spring are evident in the choice of browns, black, green, and navy highlighted by a rich golden yellow. Dramatic long ‘lanes’ of colour are interrupted by strong, angled shapes that echo the structure of the highway. In a successful career that spans more than five decades, Milly Ristvedt has held more than 50 solo exhibitions. A graduate of the Vancouver School of Art (she was born in B.C.), she also obtained an MA in Art History at Queen’s University in 2011. Ristvedt has won countless awards including the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. Her abstract, acrylic canvases are held in private, corporate and public collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and Harvard University. Milly Ristvedt is represented exclusively by Oeno Gallery.