Groping and Meditating on a Confusion of Shapes

Ron Martin (b. 1943)
Ron Martin is a contemporary artist, best known as a conceptual painter who emphasized the act of creation within his works. He began working in a studio shared with Murray Favro in 1964 and had his first solo exhibition in Jack Pollock's gallery in Toronto in 1965. He was one of the original members of the Forest City Gallery and was influenced early in his career by the Canadian artist Greg Curnoe. As noted by the Michael Gibson Gallery, Martin was amongst a small group of Canadian painters who “considered the act of creating a work a type of performance.” In painting he sets arbitrary constraints on his artistic process, such as limiting the amount of paint to be used, for which his process has been compared to conceptual art.

Ron Martin’s work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in Canada and internationally, including at the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario. His work is represented in many public and private collections, notably, the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Vancouver Art Gallery, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Museum London, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY, and Southern Alberta Art Gallery and the Mackenzie Art Gallery. Martin received a Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2012. He is also a musician, writer and independent curator.