Contemporary Canadian Art Boxed Notecards

Starting around the middle of the twentieth century, there was an explosion of abstract art in Canada. With a shared belief in the power of art to transform lives, abstract artists defined a new national modernity. With confidence and originality, they created large, colorful, dynamic paintings that expanded the visual landscape. Each of these artists developed his own signature technique and deeply personal iconography. Jack Bush’s canvases explore the formal arrangements of pure flat colors that emphasize the two-dimensionality of the picture plane. Paterson Ewen gouged plywood with an electric router to create monumental works based on the natural phenomena that moved him. Kazuo Nakamura’s paintings stand apart as contemplative and delicate investigations of the fundamental universal pattern in all art and nature. His remarkable sensitivity to materials and his restricted palette evoked a mysterious and spiritual unity. Kenneth Lochhead experimented with colors and their hues in geometric configurations and created deliberately ambiguous relationships between figure and ground in his paintings.

Published with the Art Gallery of Ontario.