David Elliott
One of the principal Canadian painters associated with the late seventies and early eighties return to figuration, Elliott is a self-prescribed postmodern collagist with strong affinities for nineteenth-century symbolism and twentieth-century metaphysical painting. Elliott chooses and arranges images with both rigor and vitality that serve to evoke feelings of Romanticism from ages past.
David Elliott is perhaps best known for his large, often monumental oil paintings on canvas, which are included in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. More recently, the artist has re-oriented his practice towards the making of the small collage boxes, that once served as maquette studies for his paintings. Intimate, often sentimental, with a touch of dark humour, they have the appearance of vignettes from a stage or film production. While the materials and scale of Elliott's work have changed, the poetics, sentimentality & dramatic staging remain.
David Elliott has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally for over 40 years. His large-scale canvases are included in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. His recent solo exhibitions include Million Dollar Bash at Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran (2017), Depuis un bon moment (2024) and Sweet Spot (2021) at Galerie Nicolas Robert.
Elliott also curates and writes about art. His feature article Grave Nowhere: The Unstoppable Paintings of Philip Guston appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of Border Crossings magazine and he is currently organizing an overview of R. Holland Murray’s work in the context of Black History Month at the Fondation Guido Molinari (Feb-April 2022).
Recent Exhibitions
Chapitre III - Group exhibition
From April 4 to May 25, 2024
A Symphony of Untold Depths - Group exhibition
From July 15 to September 2nd, 2023
Sweet Spot
From December 11, 2021, to January 22, 2022
All Kinds of Time
From June 18 to July 23, 2022
7th Heaven
From February 1st to March 14, 2020
