Alex Colville

"Alex Colville (1920-2013) is perhaps Canada's best known twentieth-century painter. After serving as a war artist in the Second World War, Colville went on to produce a body of work whose influence has extended into the broader culture. Working in a heightened-realist style, Colville invests imagery from his everyday small-town life with tension, evoking the individual's precarious assertion of humanity and order upon a landscape where the experience of nihilism and despair are never fully eclipsed."--