CITIES

This exhibition of 18 new Hartman works from a variety of public and private collections has been organized and circulated by the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound in partnership with the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and will tour Canada through 2009.

As one of Canada’s leading contemporary painters, John Hartman is known for his large-scale expressionistic landscape paintings animated with the imagery of local historic events and personal narratives.

For CITIES, Hartman has painted cities both large and small, demonstrating a particular interest in cities that are also ports. His paintings of imagined aerial perspectives look down on the intricate contours of the urban space where towers, cranes and docks meet the open blue of an ocean, lake or river.

Hartman sets out to combine his own memories of cities with a collective understanding informed by many factors: history, politics, film, literature, technology, and the media. What results is a multi-faceted mapping that may not be geographically exact, but is immediately recognizable.