Gerald Ferguson was a conceptual artist and painter who lived and taught in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Born in Cincinnati he was both a Canadian and US citizen. After receiving his MFA from Ohio University Ferguson taught at two institutions before coming to Canada in 1968, invited to teach at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax. He continued to teach at NSCAD until his retirement in 2006.
Ron Shuebrook is an American-born Canadian abstract artist living in Guelph, Ontario. He is a prominent teacher and administrator, as well as a writer.
Ray Mead (1921–1998) was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter and a member of the artists group known as Painters Eleven. In his work, he often used a high horizon line as a structural element.
Harold Barling Town, D.Litt was a Canadian artist who worked in many different media, but is best known for his abstract paintings.
Katherine Bradford, née Houston, is an American artist based in New York City, known for figurative paintings, particularly of swimmers, that critics describe as simultaneously representational, abstract and metaphorical. She began her art career relatively late and has received her widest recognition in her seventies. Critic John Yau characterizes her work as independent of canon or genre dictates, open-ended in terms of process, and quirky in its humor and interior logic.
Sandra Meigs is a Canadian visual artist. She is based in British Columbia, Canada. Her paintings have been exhibited in Canada and internationally and she is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
Alexandra Luke, born Margaret Alexandra Luke in Montreal, Quebec, was a Canadian abstract artist who belonged to the Painters Eleven.
Mernet Larsen is an American artist known for idiosyncratic, disorienting narrative paintings that depict a highly abstracted, parallel world of enigmatic and mundane scenarios. Since 2000, her work has been characterized by flat, origami-like figures composed of plank-like shapes and blocky volumes and non-illusionistic space with a dislocated, aggregated vision freely combining incompatible pictorial systems—reverse, isometric, parallel, and conventional Renaissance perspectives—and various visual distortions. Critics have described her approach as "a heady, unlikely brew" taking compositional cues from wide-ranging sources, including the modernist geometries of Constructivist artists like El Lissitzky, Japanese Bunraku puppet theater and emaki narrative scrolls, early Chinese landscapes, and Indian miniatures and palace paintings. Roberta Smith wrote that Larsen's works "navigate the divide between abstraction and representation with a form of geometric figuration that owes less to Cubo-Futurism than to de Chirico, architectural rendering and early Renaissance painting of the Sienese kind. They relish human connection and odd, stretched out, sometimes contradictory perspectival effects, often perpetuated by radical shifts in scale."
Stephanie Buhmann is an art critic, art historian, and curator. Born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, she lives in New York City and Lübeck, Germany. Her book series "Studio Conversations" focuses on contemporary female artists from different cities. Each book is in a different city. The concept for the "Studio Conversations" project goes back to 2012 when Buhamann became increasingly disenchanted with the media’s fixation the soaring art market. Buhmann states, "I wanted to counterbalance that trend while supporting my community by creating a permanent record of something private and simple: conversations with artists in their studios about the works on their walls."
Milly Ristvedt, also known as Milly Ristvedt-Handerek, is a Canadian abstract painter. Ristvedt lives and paints in Ontario, where she is represented by the Oeno Gallery. A monograph covering a ten-year retrospective of her work, Milly Ristvedt-Handerek: Paintings of a Decade, was published by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in 1979. In 2017, a second monograph was published by Oeno Gallery which included a survey of paintings from 1964 through to 2016, Milly Ristvedt, Colour and Meaning : an incomplete palette.
Judith Murray is an American abstract painter based in New York City. Active since the 1970s, she has produced a wide-ranging, independent body of work while strictly adhering to idiosyncratic, self-imposed constants within her practice. Since 1975, she has limited herself to a primary palette of red, yellow, black and white paints—from which she mixes an infinite range of hues—and a near-square, horizontal format offset by a vertical bar painted along the right edge of the canvas; the bar serves as a visual foil for the rest of the work and acknowledges each painting’s boundary and status as an abstract object. Critic Lilly Wei describes Murray's work as "an extended soliloquy on how sensation, sensibility, and digressions can still be conveyed through paint" and how by embracing the factual world the "abstract artist can construct a supreme and sustaining fiction."
Paul Sloggett is a Canadian abstract painter known for his use of geometric shapes and patterns in creating paintings and for his many teaching and administrative appointments at OCAD University, Toronto.
David Bolduc (1945–2010) was an abstract artist who used colour and central imagery in his paintings, inspired by artists such as Jack Bush. Critics suggest that he and artists such as Daniel Solomon formed a bridge between the second and third generations of Toronto modernists or even form part of the third generation of Toronto abstract painters which includes artists such as Alex Cameron and Paul Sloggett.
Daniel Solomon is an abstract painter who uses intense, vibrant colour in his work, combined with complex, pictorial space, inspired by artists such as Jack Bush and is a painter and professor in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University.
Ron Martin is a Canadian abstract painter. His way of generating his paintings by conceptually defined strategies differs from modernist abstraction, which seeks to enhance an artist's special aesthetic genius and craft skills. Martin works in series.
Charles Gagnon was a multidisciplinary artist known for his painting, photography and film.
Amanda Church is an American artist known for abstract paintings that reference the human figure and other discernible elements. Her works straddle representational and formalist art traditions, suggesting recognizable body parts, objects, and perspectival elements in an otherwise abstract field. Church's distinctive use of contrasting style elements has been consistently noted by critics such as Hyperallergic's Cora Fisher, who described Church's work as "whimsically overruling the left-right brain dichotomy as well as the traditionally gendered axis that divides geometric and decorative art." Church received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2017, among other awards. Her work has been covered in publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, ARTnews, Hyperallergic and Forbes Magazine. Her paintings have been exhibited in major U.S. cities as well as internationally, in galleries and museums such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Aldrich Museum. She lives and works in New York.
Medrie MacPhee is a Canadian-American painter based in New York City. She works in distinct painting and drawing series that have explored the juncture of abstraction and representation, relationships between architecture, machines, technology and human evolution, and states of flux and transformation. In the 1990s and 2000s, she gained attention for metaphorical paintings of industrial subjects and organic-machine and bio-technological forms. In later work, she explored architectural instability before turning to semiotically dense canvases combining compartments of color and collaged pieces of garments fit together like puzzles, which New York Times critic Roberta Smith described as "powerfully flat, more literal than abstract" with "an adamant, witty physicality."
Joan Willsher-Martel was a painter of abstract and pointillist landscapes, in watercolour, drawings and oils.
Roald Nasgaard is a champion of abstract art in Canada.
