In his exhibition, A Form of Remembering, 2016, Ian Mackay continues his dialogue with modern art history using a radically expanded visual vocabulary. The resulting abstract works, a mash-up of stylistic impulses and unexpected conglomerations, are at once both familiar and surprising.  Interlocked shapes, stenciled grids, splashy gestures, meandering lines, squeegeed smears, combine in a shallow illusory space, to suggest modernist  interiors or mythic landscape.
The generative force of Mackay’s practice is his experimental drawing, some of which are included in the exhibition. In a fanning-out kind of questioning, Mackay pursues interesting tensions between accident and intention, surface and depth, materiality and illusion, all the while searching for the immanent in painting.

 For over a decade, Ian Mackay has explored a quiet and intimate formalism to produce works that invoke a contemplative feeling while simultaneously referring to motifs, materials, and strategies from an array of periods on the art-historical timeline. His paintings are open-ended investigations of how mark making shapes aesthetic experience.  Sometimes the result of carefully observed depiction, or a mash-up of modernist and anti-modernist motifs, his paintings are both surprising and familiar.  In a fanning-out kind of questioning, Mackay pursues interesting tensions between accident and intention, surface, and depth, materiality, and illusion, all the while searching for the immanent in painting.

Ian Mackay is a Canadian artist living in Toronto where he maintains his studio. He completed his AOCA at Ontario College of Art in 1980 with studies in Photo-Electric Arts. In 2009 he completed a BFA at OCAD in Curatorial Studies and Integrated Media. Since 2009 Ian has concentrated exclusively on his painting practice and his work can be found in private collections