638 Kinghorne Mews
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6Z 3H5
Addition is proud to announce its new location in Yaletown in downtown Vancouver, Canada, a gallery model that collapses the boundary between contemporary art and design. Behind this approach is the intention to cultivate and strengthen cultural discourse on the West Coast by broadening the discursive sphere of art to include the various pragmatic approaches of design and related material practices.
Addition is a collaborative project co-founded by Andres Aramburu and Wil Aballe. Aramburu, a design professional with over two decades of experience, is known for his passion for harmonizing form and function to create meaningful connections between individuals and their environments. He holds a Visual Arts degree from the University of British Columbia and cut his teeth while working at Inform Interiors, considered one of the top five design stores in the world. He values collaborations with galleries across Canada and abroad, which reflects his commitment to artistic expression and seamless integration of art and design.
Aramburu’s career includes co-founding Area Living in Shanghai, China, where he served as COO, and the company achieved recognition as one of the top ten furniture distributors in the Asia Pacific region in a remarkably short time, a testament to his team’s collective effort. Returning to Canada, he established Aramburu Design, building upon his extensive expertise in traditional design, space-planning, decoration, and interior transformation.
Wil Aballe is the founder of Wil Aballe Art Projects | WAAP, a Vancouver-based contemporary art gallery operating for the past 10 years. The gallery has established a reputation by showcasing art primarily from the West Coast, internationally, in the US, Mexico and Europe. In April 2024, it is set to open its Brussels location in Anderlecht, Belgium.
In Addition’s East Gallery, the first art exhibition in the Yaletown space, 001,
Separately, a large painting by Peruvian-Italian artist, Alessandra Risi will be featured, in our Centre Gallery; it sits in a space featuring the iconic Kangourou armchair by Jean and Catherine Prouvé designed in 1947 and recently reissued by Vitra in a limited run of an edition of 100, alongside Canadian Philippe Malouin’s Brutalist DS-707 black leather handcrafted in Switzerland by DeSede, an interesting 21st-century entry into the Canadian design canon.
These art pieces and design collectibles speak to discursive ideas around the physical body and the metaphysical, the fictional and the real, the formalist and the political, the mythical and the spiritual, the representational and the abstract, the flat picture and the three-dimensional object.
Lyse Lemieux, whose public artwork, Personnages, is featured on the nearby Grosvenor building, has created a series around the object/humanoid personnages called Odradeks, depicted by Kafka in a short story based on Slavic myth. Kafka describes the Odradeks as looking like old, broken-off bits of thread and fabric, knotted and tangled together; these large paintings on Arches paper, with applied additions of cut black felt, have been situated in the same room as Anton Cu Unjieng’s tall ceramic totems, some of which are formed using traditional Filipino ceramic methods. On the surface, impressions on the ceramic are also evocative of objects covered and wrapped in twine; on the whole, they read as monumental pillars representative of the artist’s solidarity with Filipinos back in his home country.
Charlie Rea’s most recent body of work uses the imagery of Buddha and Aphrodite in repetitive forms that aggregate in meaning with every layer. Figurative forms also emerge, seemingly like people from top-down view of their curved shoulders, a form that also resembles a bean, metaphorically the source and origin of new things, evoking regrowth, rebirth and reincarnation.
These are hopeful objects in a new kind of discourse. We hope you will join us in celebrating the inaugural month of our new Vancouver art space.
