Local collectors help make Sonja Gartner’s Grand Forks exhibition a success

Visitors view works from Sonja Gartner’s Travel exhibition at the Grand Forks Art Gallery. Gartner said about eight pieces from the show found new homes, with most purchased by local collectors.

Photo courtesy Sonja Gartner.

GRAND FORKS — When Sonja Gartner’s latest exhibition closed at the Grand Forks Art Gallery on Aug. 15, about eight of her works had found new homes — with much of that support coming from collectors close to home.

Gartner thanked the Grand Forks community in a Facebook post following the close of Travel, which had been on display in the gallery’s West Gallery since June 27.

“I just wanted to say a heartfelt THANK YOU to the community of Grand Forks and surrounding area for making my recent show … such a success,” Gartner wrote.

She said many people she knows through “work and play” came to see the exhibition and that she believes about eight pieces were purchased.

Some sales came from tourists visiting the area, Gartner said, but she believed the majority of the works were bought by local collectors.

“It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside to know I am surrounded by a lot of people who genuinely love my art the way I do,” she wrote.

The exhibition continues Gartner’s long relationship with the Grand Forks gallery, where she had previously exhibited in 2015 and again in 2022 with her European Door Series.

A longtime Grand Forks resident, Gartner was born in Germany and spent formative years in Mexico, according to the Grand Forks Art Gallery. Her latest exhibition focused on landscapes from beyond the Boundary and reflected an evolution in a painting practice that once centred much more heavily on geometric abstraction.

Gartner says on her website that she began painting in oils in 2007 after working in a variety of other creative media. Her early oil paintings focused largely on mandalas, geometric art and optical patterns.

Around 2018, she began moving more deliberately toward realism, studying technique and composition while expanding the subjects she painted.

Travel reflects that more representational direction. The Grand Forks Art Gallery described the exhibition as a collection of oil paintings inspired by foreign landscapes, with Gartner moving between realism and abstraction in her treatment of place.

It is a significant change from the work Gartner exhibited at the gallery in 2015.

Sonja Gartner’s Travel exhibition brought together oil paintings inspired by places she has encountered beyond the Boundary. The show ran June 27 to Aug. 15 at the Grand Forks Art Gallery.

Photo courtesy Sonja Gartner.

The Boundary Sentinel covered Gartner ahead of a 2015 exhibition at Gallery 2. At the time, Gartner was described as a self-taught painter whose work explored mandalas and geometric forms.

Gartner told the Sentinel then that she enjoyed the process of building an image through hundreds or even thousands of small individual elements.

Her own exhibition history shows she was already active in the Grand Forks arts community before that Gallery 2 show, including exhibitions at Kocomos beginning in 2011. She returned to the Grand Forks gallery for another exhibition in 2022.

More than a decade after the Sentinel first wrote about her gallery work, Gartner’s subject matter has changed considerably.

The response from local buyers, however, suggests Grand Forks audiences have continued to follow that evolution.

For Gartner, the success of Travel was not simply the number of people who walked through the gallery. It was discovering that people from her own community valued the work enough to take some of it home.

Travel ran June 27 to Aug. 15 at the Grand Forks Art Gallery.