David MacWilliam is a Canadian artist, art educator, writer and curator. For over 40 years, his broad art practice has produced exhibitions, books, essays and curatorial projects. MacWilliam was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and grew up on the west coast of Canada. He received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MA in Visual Arts from University of the Arts London.
His early work mainly consisted of paintings featuring simple, centralized shapes on flat colour field backgrounds. Starting on paper and then canvas, they were often small, fragile and hid their complexity within a somewhat casual appearance. MacWilliam came to prominence in 1984 with a mid-career exhibition of paintings curated by Greg Bellerby for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria that was followed in 1990 with an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery curated by Ian Thom that featuring work referencing the drapery found in renaissance and baroque paintings. These bolder, convincingly-rendered paintings prioritized one of painting’s foundational concerns—the figure-ground relationship.
By the late 1990s, MacWilliam shifted his painting, alluding to templates of found shapes and everyday tools, and away from art historical references and the artist’s hand. In the new millennium he continued to experiment with painting, drawing, Rorschach-like inkblots, textile work and public art. In 2010 he was commissioned by the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program to create Kingsway Luminaires, six poles topped with illuminated globes programmed to slowly change colour throughout the night.
He has exhibited his paintings in numerous solo and group exhibitions over the past forty years including the Paris Biennale (1982), Vancouver Art Gallery’s Art and Artists 1939–83 (1983), and more recently the VAG’s PAINT exhibition (2006/07) and Geometry of Knowing at the Audain Gallery, SFU (2015). He has had one person exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1984), and the Vancouver Art Gallery (1990), the Galleria Panorama, Barcelona (1997), the Musee Regional de Rimouski in Quebec (1998) and most recently in 2018 at ENIA’s Barra de Fero in Barcelona and at Plan Z in the Miguel Hernandez University in Elche, Spain.
As an active member of the Vancouver art community, in 2017, he co-curated Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting with Bruce Grenville for the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2018, he curated Robin Peck: Crania at Or Gallery, Vancouver, and he co-curated Garry Neill Kennedy’s Remembering Names with Jonathan Middleton at CSA Space. In 2020, he also curated Now Bulletin: Artworks, Letters and Printed Matter from the Garry Neill Kennedy Collection for Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver. MacWilliam is is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy and a Professor Emeritus in the Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design where he taught from 1988 to 2017.
contact: davidmacwilliam at gmail dot com