Entangled is a big, energetic, and engaging exhibition. It trots us past an abundance of contemporary works, from John Heward’s hanging pieces of paint-stained fabric to Jessica Groome’s tabletop paper “flags”, and from Neil Campbell’s eye-popping black-on-white mural to Jeanie Riddle’s installation of neatly folded canvases set against a brilliant yellow ground. Composed of some 70 works by 31 artists, Entangled examines (mostly) abstract painting created in Canada since the 1970s, a time when the medium was declared dead, defunct, or worse, irrelevant. Some painters, however, were not entirely convinced of its demise. Human beings, after all, had been applying pigment to receptive surfaces for tens of thousands of years. Painting was too old to die.
