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Higher States: Lawren Harris and His American Contemporaries
October 7, 2017 @ 10:00 am - January 7, 2018 @ 5:00 pm MDT
Opening reception Oct. 6 at 7:30 p.m.
From mountains to states of mind, Lawren Harris aimed to always go higher. After his soaring depictions of mountains and icebergs made him famous and became quintessential Canadiana, the iconic landscape painter and member of the Group of Seven turned to abstraction, seeking to find or create “the spiritual in art.”
Although Lawren Harris’s career is overwhelmingly defined by his paintings of the northern wilderness, his output as a landscape artist was merely the first stage in his artistic vision quest. A fascinating character full of contradictions, Harris, perhaps one of the most vocal advocates for a unique Canadian art and identity, left his country for the United States in the 1930s with the intention of never returning. In doing so he abandoned the style of painting that brought him widespread acclaim.