NADA New York 2025

One of the principal Canadian painters associated with the late seventies and early eighties return to figuration, Elliott is a self-prescribed postmodern collagist with strong affinities for nineteenth-century symbolism and twentieth-century metaphysical painting. Elliott chooses and arranges images with both rigor and vitality that serve to evoke feelings of Romanticism from ages past.

David Elliott is perhaps best known for his large, often monumental oil paintings on canvas, which are included in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec. More recently, the artist has re-oriented his practice towards the making of the small collage boxes, that once served as maquette studies for his paintings. While the materials and scale of Elliott’s work have changed, the poetics, sentimentality and dramatic staging remain.