Jock Macdonald: Evolving Form is a travelling exhibition celebrating the artist’s life and exhibiting many previously unknown works for the first time. Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, the exhibition begins with Macdonald’s early painting career in Vancouver, surveys his move toward abstraction and his extraordinary automatics, and concludes with the later abstractions he produced as part of the Painters Eleven, the Toronto-based collective of abstract artists. Evolving Form is the first major retrospective of the artist’s work in over thirty years and is a fresh look at the influential artist’s career.

Over the course of his career, the subject of Jock Macdonald’s work slowly shifted from the outer to an inner landscape. A contemporary of the Group of Seven, his early work mirrors theirs in appearance and intent. As his career progressed, landscape painting became an inadequate visual language for his artistic voice and he instead turned to abstraction to express a higher reality. Influenced by spirituality and Surrealist thinking, Macdonald believed that the artist’s task was to “break out of the tangible reality of daily existence to realize the highest planes of art expression”. (Pg 15, Thom, The Early Work: An Artist Emerges) His career was an artistic journey in a perpetual state of evolution and growth. As a founding member of Painters Eleven, Macdonald’s contribution to abstract painting in Canada is seminal.