IAN MACKAY
A FORM OF REMEMBERING

MAY 25 TO JUNE 18, 2016
OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY MAY 28, 2-5 PM
EXTENDED HOURS DOORS OPEN TORONTO: SUNDAY, MAY 29 2-5 PM

The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present A Form of Remembering by artist Ian Mackay.

For over a decade, Ian Mackay has explored a quiet and intimate formalism to produce works that invoke a contemplative feeling while simultaneously referring to motifs, materials and strategies from an array of periods on the art-historical timeline.  In his new exhibition, A Form of Remembering, he continues a dialogue with modern art history using a radically expanded visual vocabulary. The resulting abstract works, a mash-up of stylistic impulses and unexpected conglomerations, are at once both familiar and surprising.  Interlocked shapes, stenciled grids, splashy gestures, meandering lines, squeegeed smears, combine in a shallow illusory space, to suggest modernist  interior scenes or the compressed density of digital networks. 

The generative force of Mackay’s practice is his experimental drawing, some of which are included in the exhibition. In a fanning-out kind of questioning, Mackay pursues interesting tensions between accident and intention, surface and depth, materiality and illusion, all the while searching for the immanent in painting.

Ian Mackay is a Canadian artist living in Toronto where he maintains his studio. He completed his AOCA at Ontario College of Art in 1980 with studies in Photo-Electric Arts. In 2009 he completed a BFA at OCAD in Curatorial Studies and Integrated Media. Since 2009 Ian has concentrated exclusively on his painting practice and his work can be found in private collections.

imackay.ca