Jock Macdonald: Evolving Form

Jock Macdonald was a pioneer of postwar abstraction in Canada and has been called one of the “greatest teachers of the century.” Evolving Form is the first major retrospective of the artist’s work in over thirty years and offers a lively presentation of the artist’s career, which spanned the country and greatly influenced the last century of Canadian art.

Jock Macdonald: Evolving Form provides a fresh look at Macdonald’s artistic practice and exhibits many previously unknown works for the first time. Tracing the unique and dramatic transformations the artist underwent throughout his artistic development, the exhibition begins with Macdonald’s early painting career in Vancouver, surveys his move toward abstraction in the thirties and his extraordinary automatics of the forties, then concludes with the later abstractions he produced as part of the Toronto-based collective of abstract artists, Painters Eleven.