Michael Smith “Fugitive Skies” March 28 – April 25, 2026

For our 8th solo exhibition with Montreal painter Michael Smith, we are excited to introduce a new body of work influenced by the sublimity of clouds.  As a young student in England, Michael Smith lived by the sea, an experience that has captivated him for years.  With these new paintings, Smith revisits what it is like to witness the interaction between the sky and the sea, the atmospheric shifts, the panoramic distance and the sensory shifts from the clouds above.  He sees the sky as a window into a world which feeds his imagination, inventing and reinventing the landscape for our witness.

“When walking in high terrain, clouds descend and ascend, swirling in a state of perpetual transmutation. Sometimes they pop up out of nowhere and sometimes mysteriously disappear. In this physical state they are the weather’s fugitive clothing.

I’ve always seen clouds as agents of change and transformation. Clouds and skies convey the most transient feature of the landscapes and yet they set a very certain temperament and presence. In these recent paintings skies and clouds fuel my imagination acting as the embodiment of a sense of wonder and expectation.”

Michael Smith was born in Derby, England in 1951.  He has lived in Montréal since 1978. He received a BFA at Falmouth College of Art in England and completed a MFA from Concordia University, Montréal in 1983. Since 1981 his paintings have been exhibited across Canada and internationally including the Saidye Bronfman Centre, Montréal, the Appleton Museum, Ocala, Florida, Galerie Damasquine, Brussels and The Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan.

In January 2010 Smith exhibited a suite of powerful 6 ½ x 9 foot paintings in a solo show at the Art Gallery of Peel in Brampton, ON. “Wrestling Vision, Conjuring Place”, curated by James D. Campbell, represented Smith’s first major solo exhibition at an Ontario public gallery in over a decade.  More recently, in 2025, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery organized a major solo exhibition “Sea of Change”, accompanied by a publication published by Goose Lane Editions.

Reviews and essays of Smith’s work have appeared in ARTnews, MODERN PAINTERS, Canadian Art and Border Crossings Magazines.

His work was also featured in the Established Artists section of the Magenta Foundation’s 2008 book Carte Blanche v.2 Painting, a survey text on the current state of painting in Canada. The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Beaverbrook Art Gallery and Rideau Hall have Smith’s paintings in their permanent collections.

Smith’s contemporary oil paintings of landscapes and seascapes investigate the relationship between image and abstraction, as well as memory and performance. Interested in illusions of illuminated space, Smith explores how light can be both incidental and instrumental to landscape paintings. Using an expressive impasto, he creates a visual language that tells a history of moments where atmospheric conditions have made claims on particular places. Ripped, jagged backgrounds and stormy explosions give way to streams of water, light, and cloud, creating places that are “both exquisite and tremendously disturbing.”

Link to Michael Smith’s Artist Page HERE