Malcolm McCormick
Malcolm McCormick’s multifaceted painting practice interrogates the phenomenon of historical atemporality within contemporary painting. To arrive at his compositions, he draws from an ever-expanding archive of shapes he has extracted from a range of modernist paintings. These shapes, although primarily unrecognizable, imbue McCormick’s painting with a sense of art history.
In addition to what the paintings are “of”, how they are painted is equally important. From sculptural minimalism to gestural abstraction, McCormick maintains a stylistic and methodological freedom across his output, and this flexibility allows him to leverage the differences between his works to his advantage. Through careful arrangement of his paintings according to their varying art historical references, he presents installations of paintings whose interconnectivity is as important as any one painting. The tension between works is the driving force of his practice, yet each work is unified by a deeply personal sense of colour and paint handling.
Many of McCormick’s works are “composite” paintings in which multiple stretcher panels make up a singular painting. Ranging from simple diptychs to complicated, interlocking forms, the constructed compositions in these works have an immovable quality that stands in contrast to the provisionality of their painterly surfaces. By drawing attention to the painting’s support, his composite works emphasize and complicate the inherent tension between image and object in painting, adding further depth to this relationship.
Malcolm McCormick lives and works in Montreal. He holds an MFA from Concordia University, and a BFA from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Recent exhibitions include Les plus beaux cauchemars / Cruel to Be Kind (Le Livart, 2023), Le printemps du MAC (2023), and no order (Joe Project, 2023).
Recent exhibitions
K Enters the Castle At Last
From May 30 to July 6, 2024
Chapitre III - Group exhibition
From April 4 to May 25, 2024
Plural art fair
From April 12-14, 2024
Art Toronto
From October 26-29, 2023
