JEFF HALLBAUER: One Day

JEFF HALLBAUER
One Day
@jeffhallbauer

Opening reception: Friday, July 26, 5-7 PM
Closing reception: Thursday, August 29, 7 PM

Exhibition: July-August 2025
Three Bentall Centre
595 Burrard St.
Vancouver, BC V7X 1L7

Curated by Wil Aballe
www.waapart.com
@waapart
wil@waapart.com

In Jeff Hallbauer’s exhibition, “One Day,” held at the newly inaugurated gallery space in the lobby of Three Bentall Center in downtown Vancouver, one is immediately struck by a 7 ft neon pink monochrome entitled “Psychic”; layered with acrylic wash, “Psychic” transcends its physical dimensions. Vibrating with a pulsating energy that spills beyond the edges of the canvas, it communicates directly with the viewer’s inner psyche through its colour affect.

A diptych of paintings, titled “Cat” and “Dog”, uses the playful imagery of children’s connect-the-dot drawings. The choice to leave the images incomplete invites viewers to engage with the paintings, to complete the figures mentally and thus become collaborators in the compositional process.

The exhibition also features an installation of ten dichromatic paintings, each rendered in optically-charged colour pairs. These paintings, displaying circles with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, collectively form a large-scale abstraction. Like “Cat” and “Dog,” these paintings encourage viewer participation, asking the audience to mentally connect the dots across canvases, dissolving the paintings into an invisible composition within the viewer’s mind. This interaction transforms the viewing experience from passive observation to active creation, emphasizing the collaborative nature of perception, imagination and painting’s innate agency.

Bio

JEFF HALLBAUER is an interdisciplinary painter based on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Watuth Nations, Vancouver. Notable exhibitions include “Weird Kid” at Deluge Contemporary Art, “Fruits” at Chernoff Fine Art, and “Towards a Fictional History of Colour” at Burrard Arts Foundation. In 2023, he completed a six-month residency as part of the Kölnischer Kunstverein studio program in Cologne, Germany, as well as the Similkameen Artist Residency later in the same year. In 2022, he had a solo exhibition cultivated from a three-month residency in Bonn, Germany at Das Esszimmer. In 2020, he collaborated with Swiss artist Dawn Nilo’s performance, “Performing Negotiations” as part of the 2020 Swiss Art Awards; the same year, he also participated in Avram Finkelstein’s flash collective experiment in political art-making, which screened at the Grunt Gallery Community Screen. His paintings have been acquired by corporate and private collections across Canada and worldwide. He is currently working on a solo presentation of his work at Art Cologne in November.