Showing 82 results

Colette Whiten (Birmingham, England 1945- ) is a Toronto-based sculptor and educator.

Robert Fones (born in London, Ontario, 1949) is a visual artist, curator, writer, designer and educator. Employing a strong ethnographical and archaeological component in his work, Fones uses sculpture, painting, woodblock printmaking, typography and photography to investigate the transition from manual to industrial production, and the hidden processes and impacts of geological and cultural change within contemporary society. Since 1976 he has lived and worked in Toronto, represented variously by Carmen Lamanna
Gallery, S.L. Simpson Gallery and (currently) Olga Korper Gallery. He has exhibited at artist-run centres and public institutions throughout Canada and, internationally, in the USA and Germany. His work is held by the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and other public and corporate collections. Fones is an active participant in the visual arts community, having served on the board of the Art Gallery of Ontario, C Magazine Foundation and the Acquisitions Committee of the Design Exchange. He curated an exhibition for The Power Plant on the work of Toronto furniture designer, Russell Spanner, and Cutout: Greg Curnoe, Shaped Collages 1965–1968 for Museum London. He has written extensively
about art and artists such as Greg Curnoe, Murray Favro, Donald Judd and John Massey. Fones has taught at OCAD University, the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, and in the Art and Art History Program at Sheridan College. He has published numerous reviews and articles in Vanguard, C Magazine, Parachute and other publications, published several artist books, participated in several poetry readings across the country; and undertaken several design and public art projects. He received the Toronto Arts Award in 1999 and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2011.

Barbara Astman (1950- ) is a Toronto-based artist who has worked in a wide range of photographic and mixed-media formats. Born in Rochester (NY), Astman was educated at the Rochester Institute of Technology School for American Craftsmen and, after moving to Toronto in 1970, the Ontario College of Art. She was a pioneer in the field of colour xerography, and her practice has included a mix of camera art, new media, sculpture and light projection installations. Thematically, her work has explored issues of identity, history, memory, systems of representation and gender perspectives, often involving her own body as a subject. She has executed a number of public art commissions for clients including the Calgary Winter Olympics, the City of Ottawa (St. Laurent Complex Recreation Project), Hayter Street Developments (Bay/Hayter Condominiums, Toronto) and Cadillac Fairview Corporation (Simcoe Place, Toronto). Astman is now a professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, where she has been teaching since the mid-1970s. She is represented by the Corkin Gallery. Her work is found in prominent public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Ontario, The Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris, France), and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

John Hamilton Bush (1909–1977), primarily known as Jack Bush, was a Canadian painter best known for his Abstract Expressionist style. Born in Toronto, he lived in London, Ont. and Montreal during his early years. Jack Bush began his career in advertising, working in his father’s firm, Rapid Electro Type Company in Montreal. During this time, he studied at the Art Association of Montreal with Edmund Dyonnet and Adam Sherriff Scott. In 1928, he transferred to the company’s office in Toronto, where he took evening classes under Frederick Challener, John Alfsen and Charles Comfort at the Ontario College of Art. Bush’s early work as a painter was influenced by Comfort and the Group of Seven, and throughout the 1930s and ‘40s he produced largely landscape and figurative paintings. His first exhibition was with the Ontario Society of Artists in Toronto in 1936.
In 1934, Jack Bush married Mabel Mills Teakle, a family friend from Montreal, and together they had three sons, Jack Jr (b. 1936), Robert (b. 1938) and Terry (b. 1942). In 1953, dissatisfied with Canada’s place in the international contemporary art scene, Bush and several other Toronto abstract artists founded the group Painters Eleven. William Ronald, another member of Painters Eleven, and an artist who had worked in New York, introduced U.S. art critic Clement Greenberg to the group, which led to a lasting friendship between Bush and Greenberg. The contact with Greenberg in 1957 led to Bush’s international breakthrough in the early 1960s, beginning with his 1962 exhibition at the Robert Elkon Gallery in New York. Between the late 1950s and mid ‘60s, Bush painted in loose brushstrokes with diluted oils, staining paint onto unprimed canvas. In 1966, concerned by the health hazards associated with oil-based paints, he switched to water-based acrylics, less textured than oils but more brightly coloured.
In 1964, Jack Bush’s work was included in Greenberg’s Post-Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum, an exhibition that travelled to Minneapolis and Toronto. Along with Jacques Hurtubise, Bush represented Canada at the Bienal de São Paulo (Brazil) in 1967. In the year preceding his death in 1977 (from a heart attack), he received the Order of Canada. That same year, the Art Gallery of Ontario mounted a retrospective exhibition of his abstract works that travelled to several Canadian galleries. Jack Bush’s work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, London’s Tate Gallery and others.

Dennis Burton (1933-2013) was a Canadian artist and art educator, based much of his life in Toronto and Vancouver. Born in Lethbridge, Alberta, Burton moved to Ontario in 1950 on a scholarship to Pickering College, Newmarket, where he attended Fred Hagan’s art classes. Burton’s education continued at the Ontario College of Art (graduated 1956); the University of Southern California (1955) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (1959). He worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a senior graphic designer, 1957-60. Burton achieved artistic fame in the mid-1960s with his controversial paintings of female undergarments (giving rise to the term “Garterbeltmania”) and abstractions inspired by genitalia. He was represented by the Isaacs Gallery, Toronto, through the 1960s and 1970s, and became associated with other gallery artists. He was a founding member of the Artists’ Jazz Band, in which he played saxophone. Burton worked extensively as an illustrator throughout this period. His career as an art educator began with his tenure as Chairman of Drawing & Painting Department at the Ontario College of Art, 1970-71; he was Director of the New School of Art 1971-1977, and a founding faculty member and President of Arts’ Sake inc. (1977-78). Burton also taught at the Banff School of Fine Arts (1974), and the University of Lethbridge (1976 & 1989). He was Artist-in-Residence at the Emily Carr College of Art, 1979-80, before accepting a full-time teaching position there in 1980. Burton has exhibited extensively throughout Canada; his work is in numerous public and private collections, including that of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Burton's third wife, the artist Diane Pugen, was the model for a number of his paintings. He had two daughters, Varyn and Maihyet.

Gershon Iskowitz (1919-1988) was an abstract painter based in Toronto for much of his artistic career. Born in Kielce, Poland on 24 November 1919, he survived internment in Nazi concentration camps and lost his entire family in the Holocaust. Iskowitz studied art in Munich at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in 1947, soon transferring to private studies with Oskar Kokoschka. He moved to Toronto in 1949. His work developed from wartime imagery to a focus on landscapes (particularly inspired by practice in the Parry Sound area), eventually arriving at his mature abstract expressionist style in 1967. Iskowitz began exhibiting with Gallery Moos in 1964, a relationship which continued throughout his career. He taught at the New School (Toronto) from 1967-1970, and his informal mentoring of artists in Toronto is often noted. Iskowitz, along with Walter Redinger, represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1972. The artist established the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation in 1985, with the mandate of awarding the Gershon Iskowitz Prize to a mature practising artist; since 2007 the Foundation has partnered with the Art Gallery of Ontario to administer the Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO.

Anita Aarons (1912-2000) was an Australian-born artist, educator, curator and arts administrator who was active in Toronto from 1964 to 1984. During her time in the city she taught at Central Technical School, was the allied arts editor for Architecture Canada (1965-1971), worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario as a curator in the Extension Services department in the early 1970s, and became the founding Director of the Art Gallery at Harbourfront (precursor of The Power Plant), 1976-1984. In 1985 Aarons moved to Noosa, Queensland with her husband, the artist Merton Chambers, where they were both instrumental in the establishment of the Noosa Regional Gallery.

Richard Lea Amis (1947– ), chiefly known as Ric Amis, is a media artist living in Toronto who works in still photography and video art. He was born in Montreal and studied at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) and the University of British Columbia. In the 1980s and 1990s, he volunteered with several artists’ and art-related organizations, including artists’ housing co-operatives and art collectives, retaining records from his participation. Ric Amis also held salaried positions as general manager of Trinity Square Video 1978–1980, and managing director of the Association of National Non-Profit Artists’ Centres 1984–1990. Between 1993 and 1996 he was executive director of the magazine Opera Canada, and since 1997 has been proprietor of a computer-support company in Toronto.

Ingrid Baxter (1938-) is a Canadian conceptual artist known for her work as part of the N.E. Thing Company.