Underwood

A highly distinguished Montreal painter, Stanley Cosgrove is one of the most recognizable figures in modern Canadian art. Having deliberately steered clear of the upheavals of radical abstraction, he developed a timeless body of work characterized by a quest for calm, restraint, and classical purity.

Cosgrove’s thinking is dominated by the notion of permanence. Influenced by his stay in Mexico with the muralist José Clemente Orozco, he incorporated architectural rigor into his subjects. For him, aesthetics lie in simplification: eliminating the superfluous to leave only the fundamental structure of form and color.

His most famous series features birch and pine forests. In these works, he treats the trees as temple columns, creating vertical compositions imbued with a profound inner peace.

His faces, often female, evoke icons or ancient frescoes. They are characterized by simplified features and an expression of melancholic contemplation.

An influential professor at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal for over twenty years, he instilled in his students the importance of drawing and structure. A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, he demonstrated that figurative art could remain modern through the power of his composition and his minimalist style.