David Elliott
Depuis un bon moment

From November 7 to December 21, 2024

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present Depuis un bon moment, a solo exhibition by David Elliott. During the 1980s David Elliott made a series of large canvases, which he tends to refer to as his «Mexican Paintings», not because they were created in Mexico but because fifteen of them were shown at the Museo d’arte Moderno, in Mexico City, in the winter of 1993. A mash-up of counter-culture psychedelia, late 19th Century Symbolism & Pop Art, they were cosmic, carnivalesque & darkly humorous. Challenging the high seriousness & careful strategies of late modernist abstraction, which remained particularly strong in Montreal at the time, they proposed fantastic imagery & grand-scale illusion. 

This exhibition showcases four surviving paintings from this important body of work, alongside a selection of the artist’s recent collage boxes. While the materials & scale of Elliott's work has changed, the poetics, sentimentality & dramatic staging remain.  A brilliant bricoleur, the artist continues to delight the viewer in surprising ways.

David Elliott has exhibited his work both nationally & internationally for over 45 years. His large-scale canvases are included in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal & the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Recent solo exhibitions include Million Dollar Bash at Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran (2017), Seventh Heaven (2020), Sweet Spot (2021) & All Kinds of Time (2022) at Galerie Nicolas Robert. Elliott also curates and writes about art. His feature article The Unstoppable Paintings of Philip Guston appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of Border Crossings & he organized an overview of R. Holland Murray’s work in the context of Black History Month at the Fondation Guido Molinari in 2022.