Our latest Artist You Need To Know is someone who has a solo exhibition about to open at Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto (on the 7th of November, 2020). Alex Cameron’s work is an ongoing exploration of colour and texture that has spanned over four decades. Born in 1947, he was influenced by New York City’s Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1960s, while also being shaped by the many intersecting currents of experimental abstraction in his home of Toronto.
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Pinky Also, 1973
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Totem on Red, 1997
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Bodhi, 1995
From Bau-Xi Gallery: Cameron’s “celebration of pure pigment has since characterized his canvases. His thick painterly application lends lively sculptural form to both energetic landscapes, and non-representational studies. Not only bold and bright, Cameron’s colours are unconventional, inverted, and built up in linear “ropes” of paint, often applied straight from the tube, that make his surfaces hum with life. His subjects—the varied landscapes of Canada observed during his regular coast to coast travels—are not merely captured or recorded in paint, but rather honoured for their complexity; they are organic, total, and magical environments that live and grow.” Considered by many to be an heir to Jack Bush, or the Painters Eleven, much of his work melds a Tom Thomson style of landscape with an intense palette and impasto technique, creating pictures that allude to a solidity of paint as an almost geographical surface. Camerons’ aesthetic is as much about the Canadian landscape as it is about the flexibility and tensile nature of paint.
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Swirling, 2020
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Crashing Rocket, 2020
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Double, 2020
His expressive and elaborate works are in numerous collections, in Canada and abroad. Notable collections include the AGO – Art Gallery of Ontario, the RBC, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Canada Council for the Arts | Conseil des arts du Canada, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery and The Queen’s Silver Jubilee Art Collection. His exhibition record is also quite long: significant solo exhibitions have been mounted at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Art Gallery of Windsor.
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Untitled, 1973
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Ardour Bell, 1997
For more of his prolific practice, you can visit the CCCA site, hosted by Concordia University, or you can see some new works that will be on view at Bau-Xi that highlight his more contemporary forays into the contested and evolving space of abstraction.