Tanya Leighton is pleased to announce ‘Night Sweat’, the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Vancouver artist Elizabeth McIntosh and her first solo exhibition in Europe. McIntosh’s beguiling paintings blend abstraction and associative figuration through painterly gesture. The group of new paintings that comprise ‘Night Sweat’ work out raw impulses with wit. Seeming to reinvent themselves at each glance, they reveal McIntosh’s uncommon instincts for composition and palette.

McIntosh’s latest body of work – draws subject matter from art history, nature, and moments from the artist’s life, all of which are subjected to her intuitive and transformative approach to painting. Motifs reoccur, flipped and rotated, their hues shifted. Recognisable imagery is paired with painterly forms that could be any number of objects, or maybe none of them. Her paintings exude spontaneity, while still signalling the plans that shaped them. McIntosh slyly undermines conventions of the medium that didn’t seem apparent until one is standing in front of her work. Their contradictions and reversals make them all the more endearing as testaments to painting’s long and manifold history, as well as its capacity for boundless reinvention.

Elizabeth McIntosh has exhibited widely throughout North America with exhibitions at Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; CANADA, New York; the Contemporary Art Gallery; and the Vancouver Art Gallery. McIntosh has been the recipient of numerous awards, public commissions and grants, including most recently the Fogo Island Artist Residency. Her work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, among others. She is a professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.