Regional artist Gary Evans is widely recognized for his distinctive painting practice that spans two decades. This summer, the MacLaren presents a survey of the artist’s celebrated oil paintings from the mid-2000s to the present, complemented by a selection of recent collages.
Evans’ vibrant paintings challenge traditional notions of perception and our experience of the landscape. His inventive approach references historical painting—Arcadian subjects and lively Baroque brushwork—as well as contemporary themes such as consumerism and urban sprawl. Layered with dense colours and shifting points of perspective, Evans’ paintings challenge us to view the world around us from an alternative vantage point, accelerated by movement through space and time.
Further emphasizing the visual impact of our increasingly technological culture, Evans’ collages arrange excised imagery from fashion magazines into carefully constructed spatial collisions. Decontextualized, these fragments depict abstracted formal structures that echo the mysterious and furtive energies of his paintings.
Gary Evans was born in Weston Super Mare, England and lives in Alliston, Ontario. With a career spanning more than two decades, his numerous solo exhibitions include Seeing Things: The Paintings of Gary Evans, which toured across Canada, as well as Station, a survey of paintings presented at the Art Gallery of Windsor. He has participated in group exhibitions across Canada and internationally at venues including Humber Arts and Media Studios in Etobicoke, ON; Deluge Contemporary, Victoria, BC; the Tina B. Biennial, Prague, Czech Republic; and the Kaoshung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan. Evans is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design and is the Coordinator at the School of Design And Visual Art, Georgian College, Barrie, Ontario. He is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto.
