Woman at Pink, 10" x 8"

Oil On Canvas. 10 x 8 x 1.5 inches.

"Growing up Greek in 70s and 80s Canada meant blending in, not standing out. That identity is only now finding its way openly into the work not as nostalgia or heritage pageantry, but as something more complicated and honest. People who look like his family, in places that feel like his life. "Points of Orientation" resonates because his paintings are literally that fixed points. The people and moments you return to when you need to remember who you are."

Pete Kiriakopoulos is a Toronto-based Greek-Canadian painter, Gen X, and an emerging artist at 53 which feels about right for someone who spent decades figuring out what he actually wanted to say. His work is figurative, loose, and bright. People caught in small, real moments: a yiayia dancing, a woman stepping outside in her tracksuit to eat a donut alone, kids jumping off rocks into the water. Nobody's performing. Nobody's symbolic. They're just living, and that turns out to be enough.