My Highlights from Art Toronto
Jeffrey Spalding
If you were fortunate to see the sensational exhibit "You Are Here: Kim Dorland the Return to Painting" which ran at the McMichael Gallery during the fall of 2013 you witnessed the graduation of the artist from the"emerging" category to blue-chip superstar painter.
...And then the Globe and Mail declared him the 2013 Artist of the Year.
Kim Dorland (b. 1974) is the most accomplished and collected artist of his generation in Canada. He revived Canadian figurative/landscape painting with his signature neon-hues and graffiti influenced bravado.
This striking work on paper, with one of his signature long-haired figures, is from the transition or maturity point in his career. Reminiscent of Peter Doig, this is unmistakably Dorland.
Works on paper, especially from this era and in this size are exceedingly rare.
Framed with museum glass.
Signature: Signed, titled and dated verso. Initialled and dated lower right.
About Kim Dorland
Driven equally by his fascination with the materiality of oil paint and his interest in exploring his own life experiences, Kim Dorland creates both quietly reflective and boldly visceral sculptural paintings. Dorland builds up his images from multiple layers of thickly applied paint, sometimes adding mixed materials, like feathers, glass, string, and wood. “I draw my subject[s] from the experiences I have lived through and my impoverished upbringing,” he explains, referring to the images of wooded landscapes, trailers and low-income housing, open-air parties, fistfights, and Canadian flora and fauna that recur throughout his works.
Canadian, b. 1974, Wainwright, Alberta, Canada, based in Toronto, Canada
