Ben Woolfitt | Blue Horizon

Loch Gallery is delighted to announce the exhibition and sale of paintings and drawings by Ben Woolfitt. Born in Saskatchewan, Woolfit now lives between Toronto and New York City, exhibiting across Canada, the USA, Japan, and Thailand. Woolfit owned and operated Woolfit’s Art Supplies for over three decades which allowed him to develop the most intimate relationship with artistic materials.

 

In 1972, he founded Woolfitt’s School of Contemporary Painting, where he taught until 1979. In 2017, he established the modern.toronto, a foundation and a museum dedicated to the exhibition of non-objective painting.

 

In 2021, the Art Gallery of Ontario held a major solo exhibition of Woolfitt’s abstract drawings. These drawings reveal a very personal exercise for the artist. A process that begins every day at 6AM, drawing allows Woolfitt to work within his unconscious and subconscious states, extracting important metaphysical elements and making them material.

 

To Woolfitt, both drawing and painting are vessels for holding emotion and memory, a way to express and share his experiences through the creation of a physical object. When painting, Woolfitt applies, acrylic medium to the canvas in as many as 120 layers; he allows some elements to show through, some to be concealed, and others to unfold through the collaboration of materials. The result is a labyrinth of churning texture and luminosity, urging the audience to look deeper and to see more.

 

Intuitive, transformative, very personal, and cultivated, Ben Woolfitt’s drawings and paintings will elicit varying sentiments in each individual viewer. For Woolfitt, it is important that his audience develops their own personal relationship to the work, seeing something new and enjoying it as an offering from the artist.

 

Ben Woolfitt is exhibiting at Loch Gallery from October 19 - November 2. This feature exhibition will be followed by a major solo exhibition in the spring of 2025. We would also like to announce the forthcoming book by renowned New York art critic Donald Kuspit – the third such book exploring the artwork of Ben Woolfitt. Entitled “Art as a Defense Against Death and Personal Loss: Ben Woolfitt’s Alchemical Drawings”, the essay will also be published in Whitehot Magazine.