Following his recent solo exhibition at the West Vancouver Art Museum, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, Erin McSavaney continues his painterly investigations into the relationships between architecture, abstraction, and hyperrealism, three core threads that intertwine throughout his practice.
For McSavaney, architecture serves as both subject and metaphor. His paintings depict the built environment as a site of cultural and emotional resonance: façades and fragments of modernist structures appear not as static studies, but as spaces layered with memory, history, and sentiment. As he notes: “…my paintings are about how buildings come to resemble us, over time. There’s something about the collective consciousness that forms in those spaces, and in those grids and frameworks.” McSavaney’s precise, almost cinematic realism captures the clarity of observation while his fields of abstraction intervene to reveal painting as a process of construction and erasure, echoing the rhythms of urban change. As Ben Reeves observes: “McSavaney is straddling the seemingly irreconcilable realms by operating as a realist and non- objective painter all at once. Conceptually, there is a clashing of ontologies where post- painterly abstraction meets realism, and pure forms of modern art exist in the gritty, everyday reality of depicted back alleys and urban spaces.”