Consider this exhibition to be a love letter to Tom Thomson and Canada – two subjects at the core of the 2017-year as we celebrate Canada’s 150th year and the centenary of Thomson’s death. Passion Over Reason will take a critical approach to our fascination with Thomson and show how today’s current culture of hipster or lumbersexual fashion, as well as cultivation of outsider creed, has confirmed what Wieland pointed to in the 1970s: Thomson is Canada. This exhibition will also allow for an account of feminist approaches to the topic of Canada in art then and now.
A Primary Exhibition organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection for Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival
Size Matters brings together the work of painter Steve Driscoll and photographer Finn O’Hara for their first-ever exhibition at a public art gallery.
These Toronto-based artists face a dichotomy familiar to many Millennials: urban lifestyles combined with a love for the outdoors. Their work is a creative response to the need for a sense of scale.
This exhibition featured recent photographic work by internationally acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Sarah Anne Johnson (born 1976). Field Trip was inspired by the artist’s fascination with outdoor music festivals. Johnson first attended an outdoor festival at age sixteen, becoming immediately attracted to its dynamic and pleasure-seeking lifestyle which represented a rite-of-passage for her and many other young people.
Most great works of art begin with a drawing: ideas come out on paper first. There is a degree of intimacy and immediacy that is inherent with works on paper, and this exhibition celebrated these qualities. On Paper was on view for a limited time only, since light exposure must be kept to a minimum to ensure the conservation of the artworks.
The McMichael owes its existence and collection to the generosity of donors. A Foundation for Fifty Years will present some of the most significant donations made for the McMichael gallery’s founding year, 1966, by Signe and Robert McMichael, as well as their peers, who were all excited to make Canadian masterworks a gift to the public of Ontario. Installed in the McMichael’s principle gallery on the ground floor, this collection of masterworks celebrates our core artists - the Group of Seven and their contemporaries.
In the landscape art of the Group of Seven, the viewer has been conditioned to recognize the picturesque beauty of the Canadian forest. Fierce, strong, and often unspoiled, it reflected a sense of character for a developing nation. This exhibition, however, presents historical and contemporary art—including those of the Group and their associates—that suggests the forest is no symbol of glory; it is where beauty, mystery, fantasy, and darkness collide.
Many of the wilderness landscapes depicted in artworks by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven were interpretations serving as symbols or metaphors of place. However, writers who positioned and promoted Thomson’s and the Group of Seven’s work within a geographical and Canadian nation-building narrative, created a sense of authenticity while aligning their imagery with political as well as commercial interests.
To [Inuit], truth is given through oral tradition, mysticism, intuition, all cognition, not simply by observation and measurement of physical phenomena. To them, the ocularly visible apparition is not nearly as common as the purely auditory one; hearer would be a better term than seer for their holy men. ‐‐ Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, Acoustic Space
The leading member of the Group of Seven, Lawren S. Harris has become one of the most recognizable figures in landscape painting in Canada. A lesser known side of Harris’s story is that he spent the second half of his career as an abstract painter.
The Ontario premiere of Jack Bush: In Studio at the McMichael will be the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in a major public gallery in the vicinity of Toronto since the early 1980s. In the most classic sense, the word studio is defined as “room for study.” This exhibition was conceived as an opportunity to gather 20 select paintings in a new space with the aim to spark study.
Lawren Harris sought greater and greater heights as his career progressed; from mountains to states of mind, he aimed to go higher. This iconic Canadian landscape painter took a seemingly unexpected turn toward abstract art in 1934 – the year in which he moved to the United States, where he remained until 1940. Higher States frames Harris in the larger North American context during his years in New Hampshire and New Mexico, and features an important presentation of his US counterparts, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley. Guest curators Dr. Roald Nasgaard and Gwendolyn Owens investigate the evolution of Harris’s painting from landscape to abstraction and demonstrate his integral role in cross-border artistic developments.
This major retrospective celebrates Alex Janvier’s lifetime of creativity, knowledge and perspective, gained through his love of the land, art and Dene culture. Exploring his 65-year career through more than 100 remarkable paintings and drawings, it is the largest and most comprehensive retrospective on the artist to date.
