Hugh Mackenzie | The 90th Year
HUGH MACKENZIE | The 90th Year
March 3-17, 2018
340 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday March 3, 2:00 - 4:00pm
Bau-Xi Toronto is pleased to present a collection of work from the studio of Hugh Mackenzie. Since the 1950s, Mackenzie has appealed to the personal: love and pain are counterweights in compositions that ruminate on life in all its sadness and respite.
The exhibition marks the artist’s 90th year of life—an accomplishment which serves as a testament to the artist’s enduring creative skill. Alongside new palette knife paintings and highly detailed lithographs are rare egg tempera paintings from the 1970s, which showcase Mackenzie’s impressive range and professional foundation in technical painting and drawing. Paintings are meditations on intimate moments and range from realism to the provokingly abstract: a sleeping nude, a receding city skyline, flattened architectural vignettes, and stark figure studies together construct a quiet—but deeply emotional—portrait of an artistic life made up of fleeting visions.
Hugh Mackenzie has exhibited extensively across the country, and is the subject of numerous catalogues and publications and is represented in such major collections as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Carleton University Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. Among his accomplishments, he was notably the original draughtsman and illustrator assigned to design of the Avro Arrow. In 2017, Mackenzie was granted the Distinguished Educator Award from OCAD University, in appreciation of his lasting legacy as an instructor at OCA in the 1960s. Hugh Mackenzie lives and paints in Toronto.