Gershon Iskowitz RCA (November 24, 1919 – January 26, 1988)[1] was a Canadian artist of Jewish background originally from Poland.
The circumstances of his early life—the trauma of the Holocaust and the uncertainty of the immediate postwar period, followed by immigration and adaptation to Canada—provide a lens through which to understand and appreciate his work.
[2] Iskowitz's work does not easily fit into contemporary schools and movements, but it has been characterized as hard-edge, minimalist, abstract expressionist, and action painting.
After two and a half years his father set up a small studio area for him in their home and allowed him to spend his time drawing and painting.
On March 31, 1941, the occupying forces established the Kielce Ghetto, a few square blocks surrounded by barbed-wire-topped walls and locked gates.
From January to May 1947 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and had private study with Oskar Kokoschka who painted in an intense expressionistic style.
[2] Through his participation with the CSGA, Iskowitz befriended influential artists in the Toronto region, even exhibiting with members of the prestigious Painters Eleven.
[2] In 1954, he began attending a series of painting summer schools run by Bert Weir, where artists mentored students in McKellar, Ontario in exchange for food and lodgings.
[2] 10 years after he began attending the Artist's Workshop, Iskowitz was able to afford his own studio space, a two room apartment along Spadina Avenue in Toronto.
On a Canada Council travel grant in 1967, Iskowitz chartered an aircraft to view the coast of the Hudson Bay, an encounter which a significant mark on the artist's practice.
[2] As Iskowitz grew successful working in abstract painting, he returned to the sub-Arctic for numerous study trips.
A lover of music, Iskowitz often harmonized the classical melodies he played in the studio with his compositions, producing series like Seasons, a set of diptych oil paintings.
Its mandate was to award the annual Gershon Iskowitz Prize, in association with the Canada Council in 1986 and 1987, of $25,000 to mature artists.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, his work received critical attention and was shown in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally.
[14] In addition, in 1995 in celebration of the Prize’s 10th Anniversary the Foundation donated over one hundred and forty paintings and works on paper to many of these same institutions.