MICHAEL THOMPSON

Biography

Whenever the art world is accused of diminishing the importance of technical facility as it relates to drawing, a case for the defense is usually seen in an often-surprising appearance of drawings so exquisitely crafted that they seem to have been incarnated from vapors.

 

This characteristic describes the work of Michael Thompson, a painter and draughtsman who uses open-ended narrative subjects to point back to a misty, enigmatic past and to buried emotions. He humanizes the modern aesthetic conversation about matter-of-factness by inserting allusiveness into the equation, all the more to call into question the reliability of memory, his and ours.

 Tom Smart

MICHAEL THOMPSON was born in 1954 in Montreal, Quebec. He studied Fine Arts at Concordia University, Montreal, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1976, and a Graduate Degree in Fine Arts in 1978. He began exhibiting in 1978 and is now widely regarded as one of Canada's foremost realist painters.

 

His work has been exhibited widely in both private and public galleries in Canada and the United States, including large survey exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Kitchener-Waterloo Gallery and the Art Gallery of Peel.

 

Michael Thompson's work can be found in major public, corporate, and private collections throughout North America, including the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Art Gallery of Ontario, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, New Brunswick; Edwin A. Ulrich Museum, Wichita, Kansas; McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton; Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Museum London, Ontario; Vancouver Art Gallery, Davies Ward Phillips and Vineberg, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Gluskin Sheff and Associates and Scotiabank.

 

Michael Thompson lives and works in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and is represented exclusively by Mira Godard Gallery.

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