Canada Contemporary art
Aslan, real name Alain Gourdon, French artist, illustrator and sculptor. He is best known in France for his pin-up work. He studied at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Aslan was also the author of busts and statues of many famous people (actors, politicians, singers). His works are often characterised by grace, courage and ardour. Aslan masterfully conveys the beauty and emotional depth of the female body, playing with lines, shapes and light. His compositions often evoke mixed feelings: they are both elegant and provocative, evoking a dialogue between eroticism and art.
Aslan's work has a surreal element to it, lending an air of mystery and singularity to his work. He combines reality and fantasy with ease, creating a world full of unpredictable and mystical images.
Philip Aziz was a Canadian artist and teacher with Greek and Lebanese roots. He was recognised for his work in egg tempera, a technique popular during the Renaissance.
Philip Aziz was a lecturer in drawing at Yale University, lectured in art history at the University of Western Ontario, and was a resident and lecturer at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies.
Aziz has painted commissioned portraits of Progressive Conservative Ontario Premier John Robarts, Governor General Georges Vanier and Mrs Vanier, renowned Canadian photographer Yusuf Karsh, and mezzo-soprano opera star Risa Stevens.
Mike Bayne is a contemporary Canadian artist creates miniature Photorealist paintings of overlooked North American scenes, frequently of his childhood town. Capturing every detail from his working photographs, he replicates his subject not only in terms of imagery, but often also in scale, by mimicking the size of actual commercially printed photographs. His depictions of architecture and vehicles render environments locked in a moment of time, devoid of people and movement. Visually, his works are at once abruptly realistic, and yet purposefully inorganic. He received his MFA from Concordia University and has participated in many group shows across the U.S. and Canada. His work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Nerman Museum etc. Bayne was also the recipient of the Kingston Prize for Portraiture in 2011.
Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes. His works depict locations from around the world that represent the increasing development of industrialization and its impacts on nature and the human existence. It is most often connected to the philosophical concept of the sublime, a trait established by the grand scale of the work he creates, though they are equally disturbing in the way they reveal the context of rapid industrialization.
Marcel Dzama is a contemporary artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada who currently lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited internationally, in particular his ink and watercolor drawings. Dzama works extensively in sculpture, painting, collage, and film. The artist is also known for his intricate dioramas and large scale polyptychs that draw from his talents across a range of media. Dzama works in multiple disciplines to bring his cast of human figures, animals, and imaginary hybrids to life, and has developed an international reputation and following for his art that depicts fanciful, anachronistic worlds.
Richard Art Hambleton was a Canadian artist known for his work as a street artist.He was a surviving member of a group that emerged from the New York City art scene during the booming art market of the 1980s, which also included Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. While often associated with graffiti art, Hambleton considered himself a conceptual artist who made both public art and gallery works.
Terence Koh is a Canadian artist. He is known for his provocative and often controversial works that explore themes of spirituality, sexuality, and identity.
Koh works in a variety of media, including sculpture, performance, and installation. He often incorporates found objects and materials into his pieces, such as bones, hair, and glitter.
One of his most well-known works is "Gone, Yet Still," a performance piece in which the artist covered himself in white paint and stood motionless in a gallery for hours at a time. The work explored ideas of stillness, mortality, and transcendence.
Koh's work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Tate Modern in London.
He has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2007. His work is noted for its confrontational and often unsettling qualities, as well as its ability to challenge viewers' assumptions and beliefs about art and the world around them.
Horst G. Loewel is a German-born painter who lives and works in Canada and Spain.
Loewel is a representative of the fantastical-surrealistic trend in art. He meticulously and realistically depicts landscapes of another universe filled with symbolism. Thanks to his boundless imagination, the artist shows us a fabulous, unreal world in which man has almost no place.
Robert Polidori is a Canadian-American photographer known for his large-scale color images of architecture, urban environments and interiors. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Martin-Gropius-Bau museum (Berlin), and Instituto Moreira Salles (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro). His photographs are also included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), New Orleans Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Château de Versailles, Centre Pompidou (Paris), and Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), as well as many private collections.
Jean-Paul Riopelle was a Canadian painter and sculptor from Quebec. He had one of the longest and most important international careers of the sixteen signatories of the Refus Global, the 1948 manifesto that announced the Quebecois artistic community's refusal of clericalism and provincialism. He is best known for his abstract painting style, in particular his "mosaic" works of the 1950s when he famously abandoned the paintbrush, using only a palette knife to apply paint to canvas, giving his works a distinctive sculptural quality. He became the first Canadian painter since James Wilson Morrice to attain widespread international recognition.
Peter Schuyff is an internationally exhibited Dutch-born American painter, musician and sculptor. In 1967 moved with his family to Vancouver, Canada. Schuyff's mother was an artist and his father a professor of economics at Simon Fraser University. Peter became fascinated with the radical views of the art world in the 60s and 70s and especially with such famous figures as Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning. He was raised in Canada and was schooled in art at the Vancouver School of Art.
Jeff Wall is a renowned Canadian artist, celebrated for his large-scale backlit Cibachrome photographs and insightful art history writings. His artistic journey began in the late 1970s, creating images that balance between painting and photography, often resembling movie stills in their complexity and narrative depth. Wall's unique approach involves elaborate setups with actors, sets, and post-production, akin to single-frame movies, leading to works that demand viewers' attention similar to paintings or films.
His seminal piece, "Picture for Women" (1979), reflects his deep engagement with art history, referencing Édouard Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" and exploring themes like the male gaze within a contemporary context. Another notable work, "A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)" (1993), showcases Wall's digital montage technique, combining numerous photographs to create a seamless image that reimagines a 19th-century Japanese print in a modern setting.
Jeff Wall's transition to using digital technology in the 1990s allowed him to merge various negatives into a coherent whole, pushing the boundaries of traditional photography. His works, often displayed as transparencies on lightboxes, introduce a novel way of experiencing photographic art, blending narrative depth with meticulous attention to detail.
For art collectors and experts, Jeff Wall's work represents a profound intersection of photography, cinema, and painting, offering a rich field for exploration and appreciation. His pieces, found in major museums and galleries worldwide, continue to influence and inspire discussions in the realms of art and photography.
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Anna Weyant is a Canadian New York City–based artist whose figurative paintings blend influence from the Dutch Golden Age with an awareness of contemporary popular culture and social media.
Weyant has been represented globally since May 2022 by Gagosian Gallery, owned by Larry Gagosian.
Dana Wyse is a Canadian writer and visual artist.
Wyse’s early career was characterized by photography works exploring Canada and its history and environment. Photography works by Wyse can be seen in the book Vancouver: A History in Photographs. In 1996, Wyse began her best known artwork, a pill-themed installation called Jesus Had A Sister Productions. It is a work-in-progress to which the artist adds new elements each year and that crosses the line between art and business.