Jack Hamilton Bush

Jack Hamilton Bush

Jack Hamilton Bush was one of the first Canadian artists to garner international recognition. He was raised in London, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec. Bush initially worked as a commercial artist, but was inspired to pursue a career in the fine arts when he encountered the work of the Group of Seven.

During the 1930s in Toronto, Bush studied painting at the Ontario College of Art where he zealously painted landscapes. During this time, he developed his own unique style that employed a thoughtful arrangement of form and colour. He applied vibrantly coloured bars, and other geometric shapes with assertive motions, into compositions that were inspired by nature. These works retained a feeling of the landscape despite being rendered with abstracted motifs. Bush initially painted with oil paints, then acrylic and, later on, gouache as he strived to create strong, opaque imagery.

Dissatisfied with Canada’s detachment from the international art scene, he soon became a founding member of the Painters Eleven, a group of Toronto-based Abstract painters. In the late 1950s, the Painters Eleven and Bush made many connections in New York, including a friendship with revered art critic, Clement Greenberg.

In the 1960s, his international success grew. Notably, his work was included in Greenberg’s Post Painterly Abstraction 1964 exhibition and he was chosen as one of the artists to represent Canada at the São Paulo Biennial in 1967. Major retrospectives of his work have been held at the Art Gallery of Ontario (1976) in Toronto and the National Gallery of Canada (2014) in Ottawa. His work can be found in their permanent collections as well as in those of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in Quebec, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in Massachusetts, and the Tate in London.

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was born near Vitebsk, Russia (today Belarus). He was raised in a Jewish community and attended religious schools throughout his youth. In 1906, Chagall left Vitebsk to study at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting in St. Petersburg. During his studies he was apprenticed under Leon Bakst, an artist and set designer who encouraged Chagall to express his Jewish heritage through his art practice.

He moved to France in 1910 and became a prominent painter at the École de Paris. His work combined Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism to create dream-like motifs in a poetic and figurative style. As his practice evolved, Chagall continued to express his Jewish identity, bringing together cultural traditions coupled with aspects of modernism.

When Chagall returned to Russia for a short visit, he was forced to stay in the country due to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and, while there, took up the political post of Commissar of Arts. During this time, he managed to create new paintings and exhibit in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 1923, he was able to move back to Paris with his wife. He began working on commissions, traveling and exhibiting his work until the outbreak of World War II. With the threat of Hitler’s Third Reich and his publicly known Jewish identity, Chagall and his family sought refuge in New York City. In 1947, he moved back to Europe and settled in Vance, France.

Throughout the decades that followed, Chagall was commissioned to create numerous large-scale public artworks such as a stained-glass window for the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, the memorial Peace window for the United Nations, The American Windows for The Art Institute of Chicago, the ceiling of the Paris Opera House, and murals for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Throughout his lifetime, Chagall mastered a number of mediums including oil and gouache, and watercolour painting, etching, lithography, drawing, ceramics, set and costume design, as well as stained glass. His work is housed in the Palais Garnier in Paris, France, the Tate Modern in London, England, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, NY, among other prestigious international collections.

George Condo

George Condo

George Condo is an American artist known for combining Cubist-inspired faces with realistic forms to realistically represent the unreal, an approach that he has dubbed ‘Artificial Realism’. He blends elements from the European Old Masters with popular culture in his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. Inspired by notable artists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Diego Velázquez, Condo created a surrealistic style for himself that he has also termed ‘psychological cubism’.

He studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts and moved to Boston where he worked as a silkscreen printer after graduation. Condo met Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1979 and was soon after inspired to pursue a career in the arts. He began to exhibit at galleries in New York in 1981 and, during this time, he worked in Andy Warhol’s silkscreen production studio. As Condo progressed throughout the 1980s, he began exhibiting in more prestigious institutions in New York, Los Angeles, and throughout Europe, a high point being his participation in the 1987 Whitney Biennial.

In 1999, Condo received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been an invited lecturer at prestigious institutions including Yale University, the Guggenheim, and Harvard University where he taught a six-month course titled Painting Memory in 2004.

Condo has received numerous commissions throughout his career including book covers, album artwork for rappers such as Kanye West, and t-shirt designs for Barney’s New York. He continues to exhibit extensively in North America and Europe in institutions such as the Whitney Museum, the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY. He currently lives and works in New York.

Jim Dine

Jim Dine

Jim Dine is an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, poet, and conceptual performance artist. His artwork employs the use of nostalgic motifs, including Pinocchio, heart shapes, bathrobes, and tools that are both autobiographical and that focus on themes of personal identity and memory.

Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935. He studied at the University of Cincinnati and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. In 1957, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio University. He moved to New York the following year and became known for his critical role in a group of artists who initiated ‘Happenings’, which is a genre of performance art that challenges the elitism of Abstract Expressionism.

Dine believes in the power of simple images because their familiarity is accessible and relatable to any viewer. Although he uses straightforward and popular imagery, Dine resists his connection to Pop Art. Instead, he insists that his work is an extension of the work put forth by artists who question the power of iconic symbols rather than exploit them, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

In addition to his numerous international exhibitions, his work is included in the public collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, the British Museum in London, England, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the MoMA in New York, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Tate Modern in London, England, the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawai’i. Today Dine lives in New York, Paris, and Walla Walla, Washington.

Marc-Aurèle Fortin

Marc-Aurèle Fortin

Marc Aurèle Fortin was a Canadian painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. During his lifetime, he produced an estimated ten thousand paintings, many of which have been lost over the years. He is known for his decorative, colourful, and picturesque landscapes. He often painted leafy trees, rustic homes, hay carts, and scenes of Montreal featuring isolated human figures overshadowed by nature.

Fortin was born in Sainte-Rose, Quebec in 1888 and studied in Montreal under Ludger Larose and Edmond Dyonnet and at the Art Institute of Chicago. During his studies in Chicago, the works of Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, and Jean-François Millet served as great sources of inspiration.

He captured scenes of Montreal, Sainte-Rose, Quebec City, the Île d’Orléans, Charlevoix, and the Gaspé. Fortin traveled to France several times during his career to draw and paint. He experimented with printmaking, watercolour, oil paint, and pastels. He also often painted on black and grey surfaces to achieve more luminous colour.

Fortin’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions throughout Canada and abroad. Solo exhibitions were held at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreeal, the Musée des beaux-arts du Québec in Quebec City, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and in Almelo, Netherlands. In 1938, Fortin won the Jessie Dow prize from the Art Association of Montreal and, the following year, was awarded a bronze medal at the New York World’s Fair.

Sam Francis

Sam Francis

Sam Francis was an American painter and printmaker recognized as one of the most influential postwar American artists. He was born in 1923 in San Mateo, California and attended the University of California, Berkeley as a pre-med student. His studies were halted when he joined the Army Air Corps during World War II. Due to an illness caused by spinal tuberculosis, he left his military service and was hospitalized for extended periods of time over the next several years. It was confined to his hospital bed where he found his passion for painting.

After his recovery, he experimented with abstract and figurative works in the San Francisco area, inspired in part by the artistic trends dominating the 1940s – Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. He returned to Berkeley and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1949 and with a Master of Arts in 1950. After finishing his education, he moved to Paris where he worked throughout the 1950s while frequently travelling to the South of France, Mexico City, Tokyo, Bern, and New York. While in Paris, his style became associated with Tachisme, a French form of abstract painting with an intuitive form of expression. A Time Magazine feature in 1956 described Francis as one of the most popular American painters in Paris at the time.

Francis’ art has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. His work can be found in international museum collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA in New York, NY, the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, France, and the Idemitsu Museum of Arts in Tokyo, Japan. During his career, he had more than one hundred solo exhibitions and, since his death, over ninety more. Today, the Sam Francis Foundation in California continues to organize exhibitions as well as donate artworks, manage archives, and provide education to the public about his art to preserve Francis’ legacy.

Keith Haring

Keith Haring

Keith Haring was an American artist born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1958. In 1976, he began studying at a commercial art school in Pittsburgh. Upon realizing he had little interest in commercial art, he dropped out and moved to New York City to study at the School of Visual Arts. There, he participated in a thriving alternative art community that operated outside of the established galleries and museums alongside artists such as Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Haring’s career was devoted to creating public art with his ultimate goal being to create accessible art for everyone. He created hundreds of public drawings for the New York subway system, designed sets and backdrops for theaters and clubs, painted murals, and created advertising campaigns. Additionally, he opened his own retail store called Pop Shop, where he sold merchandise adorned with his imagery. His artistic expression of universal concepts such as love, sex, death, and war, along with his direct visual language, enabled a large and diverse audience to engage with his work and find meaning in it.

After Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, he used his art as a vehicle to spread awareness about the disease. He also established the Keith Haring Foundation, a non-for-profit organization with the mandate to provide help and support to children and organizations involved in research, education, and care related to AIDS. The Foundation also houses many of Haring’s artworks and archives to facilitate research.

During his brief career, before passing away at the age of 31, Haring’s work was exhibited in more than one hundred solo and group exhibitions. He collaborated with a diverse array of well-established artists and performers including Madonna, William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Timothy Leary, Jenny Holzer, and Grace Jones. His work resides in many established collections including the MoMa and the Whitney Museum in New York, NY, and the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, among others.

Lawren Harris

Lawren Harris

Lawren Harris was a Canadian landscape painter recognized for his participation in the Group of Seven, the famous group of Canadian landscape painters of the 1920s and 1930s. His work redefined the history of Canadian art and contributed to its own distinct style with his innovative representations of the northern landscape.

He was born in Brantford, Ontario in 1885 to a family with wealth and status, which facilitated his pursuit of painting. He studied at the Central Technical School at St. Andrew’s College and, from the age of nineteen, studied in Berlin. After the formation of the Group of Seven, Harris financed the construction of the group’s studio building in Toronto, which also provided other artists space in which to work. Additionally, he financed trips for the Group of Seven to paint in the Algoma region, a district in North-western Ontario.

In the late 1910s, Harris painted colourful, descriptive motifs of urban life and the Algoma region. During the 1920s, his work evolved and became abstracted and simplified, particularly in his stark landscapes of the Canadian north. Over the decade, he took numerous sketching trips around Canada, looking for inspiration in places such as Jasper National Park, Banff National Park, Yoho National Park, and Mount Robson Provincial Park. In 1930, he traveled to the Arctic on a two-month trip with a supply ship, during which time he completed more than fifty sketches. In 1934, Harris lived in and painted in Hanover, New Hampshire, and in 1938, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he organized the Transcendental Painting Group – an organization of like-minded artists who worked with a spiritual form of abstraction. After Harris achieved fame locally and internationally, he ceased signing and dating his work in the hopes that his audience would judge his pieces solely on their artistic splendour and not on their notoriety for being associated with his name. 

In 1969, Harris was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. Today, his work hangs in many prestigious public collections throughout the country including, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreal. In 2016, Steve Martin, the famed American actor and comedian, curated a travelling exhibition of Harris’ work entitled, The Idea of North, which voyaged to various institutions throughout Canada and the United States.

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is an artist, entrepreneur, and art collector who has been dominating the British art scene since the 1990s. He was born in 1965 in Bristol, England and moved to London in 1984 where he worked for a time in construction. Five years later, he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College in 1989.

Hirst’s artwork explores the relationship between art, life, and death through different mediums such as installation, sculpture, photography, painting, and drawing. As a teenager, death was fascinating to him and he made regular trips to the anatomy department of Leeds Medical School where he drew inspiration for his drawings. In 1991, he began one of his most famous series, Natural History, where he preserved dead animals in steel and glass tanks with formaldehyde solution. The most famous piece of this series, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, is a large preserved shark suspended in a tank. This piece is considered one of the most iconic symbols of modern British art and pop culture of the 1990s.

Other well-known works by the artist include For the Love of God (2007), a platinum cast skull set with 8,601 pavé-set diamonds and the site-specific installation Pharmacy (1992). He has created numerous other well-known series featuring butterflies and colourful dots.

In addition to being an accomplished artist, Hirst has worked in a curatorial capacity. In 1994, he curated the group exhibition Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away at the Serpentine Gallery, London and in 2006, the award-winning exhibition In the darkest hour there may be light, also presented at the Serpentine Gallery.

Since 1987, Damien Hirst has had over eighty solo exhibitions and has participated in over two hundred group shows. In 1995, he won the prestigious Turner Prize in recognition of his significant contribution to British art. He also had a major retrospective at the Tate Modern, London in 2012. Today he lives and works in London, Gloucestershire, and Devon.

David Hockney

David Hockney

David Hockney is regarded as one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth-century due to his contribution to the Pop Art movements in the 1960s. He was born in Bradford, England in 1937 and attended the Bradford College of Art from 1953 to 1957. In 1959, he went on to study at the Royal College of Art, London.

As he started gaining popularity from his work in London in the 1960s, Hockney began making frequent trips to the United States. In December of 1963, Hockney traveled to New York to meet Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper, as well as the curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When traveling to Los Angeles for the first time in 1964, Hockney was inspired by the landscapes, which prompted him to switch from oil to acrylic paints in order to achieve smoother, flatter, and more vibrant colours. During this time, he experimented with Polaroids, worked on a series of Southern Californian landscapes, and created the first of his famed swimming pool paintings. Hockney also taught in several American institutions throughout the decade including the University of Iowa, the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Hockney’s popularity stemmed from his innovative focus on personal subject matter, depicting the domestic realm. He devised new ways of portraying water, particularly in his painterly articulations of reflections in his swimming pool paintings as seen in A Bigger Splash (1967) and A Lawn Being Sprinkled (1967). He also painted many portraits throughout his career and, as an openly gay artist, is an advocate for gay rights and explores the nature of homosexual relationships in his artwork. 

In addition to painting, Hockney also worked as a draughtsman, a printmaker, a photographer, and a stage designer. In the 1980s, he began experimenting with photo collages with a technique he called ‘joiners’. Using Polaroids and 35mm pictures, he would shoot a single subject from different perspectives and arrange the photos like patchwork to create the final image. Since 2009, Hockney has embraced technology and painted hundreds of landscapes, portraits, and still-lifes using iPhone and iPad applications.

Today, Hockney’s work is frequently exhibited at prestigious institutions internationally. He has been awarded numerous honours and awards, the most distinguished of which was his appointment to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012 for his contributions to the arts. Most recently in 2018, he had a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. He currently lives and works in London and California.