Alex Colville

Canadian artist Alex Colville was born in the city of Toronto in 1920 but spent most of his career in the Maritimes. Colville began his education with weekly art classes starting in 1934, which soon led to his enrollment at Mount Allison University in 1938, where he studied under Post-Impressionist faculty such as Sarah Hart and Stanley Royle. After finding success as a student, working for two years as an official war artist during the Second World War, and a brief career in teaching at Mount Allison University, Colville began his career that would soon be celebrated as a pivotal piece in Canadian art and postmodern painting.

Colville’s works often explored the “myths of mundanity”—complex themes and emotional charges lurking behind static and silent images—through the artist’s characteristic pictorial naturalism and subliminal dramatism. Often looking at his immediate surroundings as the subject matter for his art, Colville struck a careful balance between the real and the imagined through his unique process. Based on extensive research, geometric drafting, repetitive sketching, and attentive planning, his works are the culmination of a steady and patient layering of thin brushstrokes, locked in place with a transparent lacquer, much like how his hand seems to suspend a moment in time for the viewer’s perusal. In each composition, Colville foregrounded the nuances of contemporary existence and questioned what lies behind the mundane.

Over the course of his long and celebrated career, Colville has been the focus of various exhibitions, such as his 1983-84 survey exhibition or the recent retrospective Alex Colville at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. His works are collected by outstanding institutional collections including, but not limited to, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Colville died in 2013.