Exhibition In Review
Lahey, Sonmor, and Bartram
From December 1 to January 24, works by three of Canada’s most accomplished painters were selected from the MSAC collection and curated into an exhibition that examined contemporary representational and non-representational painting. All are recent acquisitions for the collection and none had yet been shown in an exhibition at the gallery.
Toronto artist James Lahey is highly prolific and inventive, developing new techniques to achieve exacting aesthetic and conceptual objectives. Lahey has been painting between modes of representation and abstraction for over 20 years. With the Index Abstractions in this exhibition, Lahey broke new ground both materially, with his use of discarded paint and design of new painting tools, and artistically, by creating powerful studies of proportion, perspective, and colour.
Montreal artist Kevin Sonmor’s post-modern aesthetic combines expressionism with romanticism, abstraction with figuration, and narrative content with nuanced chromaticism. The exhibition features two major diptychs, including Labour (pictured below).
For over 30 years, Ed Bartram has painted and created abstract prints based on the rugged northern landscape of the Precambrian Shield. Bartram says: “Older than life itself, these rocks have been pushed towards the core of the earth where, under the weight of great mountains, they were metamorphosed into molten, chocolate ripple-like swirls of pink and black.”
Image:
Kevin Sonmor, Labour, 2004 (oil on linen), Gift of the Artist, 2008, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre