Against the Grain with Katja Zubkova and Marianne Lovink

Against the Grain, is a duo exhibition featuring gallery artists Katja Zubkova and Marianne Lovink. Two women and one shared material come together in an exhibition that reveals just how differently the same medium can be approached.

Katja Zubkova, based in Vancouver, treats wood like a code to be cracked. A former member of Canada’s High-Performance Biathlon team, she turned to art in 2019, and her carved wood wall sculptures carry titles written entirely in binary, encoding her own life story into each piece.

Marianne Lovink, by contrast, brings four decades of practice shaped by her Dutch design heritage and a career built across Toronto, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Her meticulously carved wall sculptures and framed paper collages explore repetition, pattern, and organic form, informed by a lifelong fascination with Modernism and mark-making across cultures.

Placed side by side, the two artists’ work become a conversation between backgrounds, generations, and approaches to a single material.

“I am drawn to materials that already have a language of their own. Wood has movement, grain, imperfection, warmth. It has a history that existed long before I shaped it, and I want the material to remain present in my work.” – Katja Zubkova