Gordon Rayner

An exhibition of Painters Eleven in 1955, and especially the work of William Ronald, which he visited with his friend, artist Dennis Burton, at Toronto's Hart House Gallery (today the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Art Museum at the University of Toronto) turned him towards abstraction [1] as did visits to the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (now called the Buffalo AKG Art Museum), to see artists such as Willem de Kooning.

[2] Under the influence of the neo-Dada movement current in Toronto in the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s, Rayner began to combine found materials with his paintings.

It provided him with a favourite painting place in which he could experiment with materials and technique while demonstrating how to refer to nature without copying it in his work.

[6] For this reason, he has been called part of the Isaacs Group of artists, which include, among others, Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, John Meredith and Graham Coughtry.

He began to reinvent this crucial subject of art for himself using dimensions of the inner, more spiritual self and obliquely explored realism in the context of the body, painting himself in inventive scenes.