The Christopher Cutts Gallery is proud to present “Ray Mead — Life is Change,” a survey exhibition dedicated to the life and work of one of Canada’s most important abstract painters. This landmark show will feature significant works from across Mead’s career, including pieces that have never before been exhibited.
Ray Mead was a founding member of the celebrated collective Painters Eleven, which helped bring abstract expressionism to the forefront of Canadian art in the mid-20th century. Mead’s sophisticated use of colour and his avant-garde modernist compositions established him as a leading figure in Canadian abstraction. His work was exhibited across Canada and internationally. During his 1957 visit to Toronto, American critic Clement Greenberg was particularly impressed with “the ‘hard-edgedness’ of Mead’s painting” and his 1950s collage works.
Over five decades, Mead’s practice was shaped, and sometimes disrupted, by the vicissitudes of life — factors like his full-time advertising career that led him to move to Montreal in the late 1950s, a subsequent eight-year break from painting at the end of the 1960s, and personal challenges like his wife’s battle with cancer and her passing in the mid-1980s, continuously transformed his artistic approach. Mead’s paintings reflect the many dimensions of his life, and he would often reiterate the phrase that he had written in large block letters across his studio, ‘LIFE IS CHANGE.’
“Ray Mead — Life is Change” will feature work spanning his entire career, showcasing the evolution of his practice, including a 1950s collage, as well as small and large works on canvas. This exhibition is both a celebration of a career that challenged conventions and expanded the possibilities of painting for succeeding generations, as well as a reflection of the artist’s remarkable life through his practice.
Join us in celebrating Mead’s artistic legacy at the opening reception on Saturday, September 6, from 2 — 6 pm!
“Ray Mead — Life is Change” will run from September 6, 2025 — October 4, 2025.
