Recent Exhibitions
December 2025 Winter Salon in Black and White, Gagné Contemporary, Toronto
November 2025 Human, Solo Exhibition Assemblage Gallery, Toronto
April 2023, Men in Cities, Solo Exhibition, Gales Gallery, York University
March 2023, a juncture, a join, a strait, a pinch, Collision Gallery, Toronto
July 2022 Peinture Fraiche et Nouvelle Construction, Art Mûr, Montreal
Education
2020 BFA, OCAD University, Toronto, ON
2023 MFA, York University, Toronto, ON
In his impressionistic black and white ink paintings on paper, Toronto-based artist Jim Russell (b. 1961) creates provocative images that ask critical questions about media, technology, gender, relationships, politics, capitalism and the truth of the image itself.
He produces images that are familiar and puzzling. Originating from common sources such as documentary and social media, personal, national and international archives, the works resonate because of their incompleteness; they hang in suspension as fragmented film stills suggesting partial narratives that can only be completed by the engagement of the viewer. To do this, viewers must draw upon their own experiences to resolve the work.
In 2023 Jim completed a major series entitled Men in Cities which seeks to celebrate and critique the power of twentieth-century Canadian modernism by mediating images of a striving male subject from that period in a way that acknowledges the problems of progress while providing a hopeful way forward through a newly constructed, rematerialized human spirit. Men in Cities imagined modern bodies in a state of ecstatic exorcism, resigned to human struggle, deeply engaged in the material transition of the body and mind, energetically vibrating with faith in a different kind of progress, with new forms beginning to take shape.
Corporate Collections
Waterstone Human Capital
Ridout and Maybee LLP
The Strategic Coach Inc.
Argosy Partners
RCOMM Radio Inc.
ExperiencePoint Inc.
Jim Russell
Email: jrussell@lennard.com
Instagram: @jimrusselltoronto