This season at Spence Gallery, four distinctive voices in contemporary art converge, each exploring movement, emotion, and meaning through their unique mediums and perspectives. From Isabelle Beaubien’s high-gloss abstract expressionism to Tadas Zaicikas’ explosive floral symbolism, Joshua Kalfa’s minimalist steel sculptures, and Laurie Barmore’s poetic, nature-inspired paintings, these artists invite us to pause, contemplate, and rediscover the world through color, texture, and form.
Since 2005, Spence Gallery has showcased the work of over 30 artists from around the world through annual participation in international art fairs. The gallery offers a high-impact, eclectic collection featuring abstraction, landscapes, figurative works, portraits, and surrealism—presented through paintings, mixed media, and sculpture.
Isabelle Beaubien
Montreal-born artist Isabelle Beaubien creates vibrant abstract paintings that radiate energy and spontaneity. Her unique technique—layering textured acrylics with high-gloss resin—produces striking surfaces that shift and sparkle with the light. Often mistaken for digital art, her work is created using self-made tools, the result is bold, gestural compositions full of movement and contrast.
Beaubien holds a Fine Arts degree from Concordia University and a Master’s in Contemporary Art from Villa Arson in Nice, France. After early success in the UK, she took a hiatus from painting to work in hospitality. After graduating, she took a hiatus from painting to work in hospitality. Upon returning, she developed a personal style rooted in freedom and emotional depth.
Influenced by Abstract Expressionism, she often completes a piece in one continuous motion, editing through subtraction. Her work is represented by Spence Gallery and has been exhibited internationally, including in New York, Seattle, San Francisco, London, Miami, and Singapore. Beaubien’s hope is that her paintings invite viewers to experience emotion through texture, color, and light.
Tadas Zaicikas
Tadas Zaicikas, also known as TedyZet, is a Lithuanian-born Canadian-based artist whose vivid, expressive works fuse abstract painting, street art, and poetic storytelling. Calling his approach Narrative Expressionism, Zaicikas explores emotion through dynamic florals, animals, and layered text, using mixed media like acrylic, ink, spray paint, and oil pastel to create richly textured, high-impact pieces.
His subjects, especially flowers, communicate chaos, beauty, and urban energy energy. “I don’t paint flowers as still objects, I let them explode with life,” he says.
Bold color palettes and movement-driven brushwork are central to his aesthetic, alongside embedded poetic fragments that invite more reflection.
After earning a Master’s degree, Zaicikas moved to Canada to pursue art full-time. His work expresses raw emotion and street-inspired edge—an artistic language that speaks through color, rhythm, and metaphor. He is the winner of local and international awards and his dynamic work is exhibited and collected internationally.
Joshua Kalfa
“I endeavor to say more with less…. reducing sculpture to its basic elements, using simple and direct forms and imagery with a strong sense of that which is playful and whimsical.” Joshua Kalfa.
Growing up at the foot of Mount Carmel by the Galilee in Israel, Joshua spent endless hours of his boyhood on the mountain observing herds of sheep and goats. For Joshua, the secret life of nature is always silent but radiates with unspoken intelligence and mystery. It is no wonder his artistic practice is rooted in capturing the compelling, enigmatic, and powerful presence of animals.
One of his favourites is the horse! His sculptures are life-size pieces installed in places where their presence is felt, whether in nature or in architectural urban settings. Using steel as his medium, he constructs what appears as two-dimensional structures, suggesting, but never fully realizing, the three-dimensional form. His sculptures have won awards and are installed in private and public spaces, in indoor and outdoor settings. Please contact Spence Gallery regarding commissions – find out about the process, timelines and installation.
Laurie Barmore
For Washington-based artist Laurie Barmore, painting is a quiet observation, a way to explore life’s hidden rhythms and deeper truths. Inspired by nature, poetry, and the subtleties of form and texture, her abstract expressionist work is often described as “visual poetry.”
Each piece begins with gestural marks, evolving intuitively, layer by layer, into a textured exploration of emotion and meaning. Barmore’s creative voice is rooted in her early experiences growing up near the forests and coastline of Santa Cruz, California, where she developed a lifelong sensitivity to light, color, and natural patterns.
Though she spent much of her professional life in nursing, she pursued art formally in her 30s and discovered painting was her true calling. It became the means of deeply expressing her inner emotional landscape.
Influenced by artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Van Gogh, and Joan Mitchell, Barmore’s work invites viewers to look beneath the surface of color, texture, and form and to uncover new ways of encountering themselves and their world.
Her layered, expressive canvases balance structure and spontaneity. She hopes that her work leads viewers to reflect and connect with the beauty and mystery of the natural world. Now retired from nursing, she devotes herself fully to her art, with paintings in private collections across the U.S. and Canada.
Spence Gallery provides personalized guidance to collectors and art enthusiasts and offers international shipping.
Learn more at www.spencegallery.com or contact: spencegallery@gmail.com
+1-416-795-2787.
