John Climenhage
John Climenhage is a painter. In conversation with poets, philosophers, fellow painters, and other artists over his 30+ year career, he has engaged in concerted formal and conceptual exploration and creation of charged and abstracted spaces en plein air as well as in-studio, that are deeply informed by current socio-political conditions and events, both local and global. Even before the 2015 release of the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) report made soberingly clear the implications of landscape painting in Canada (specifically how the painterly capture of “wild spaces” can serve to mirror and amplify the deleterious impacts of the doctrine of Terra nullius), Climenhage was exploring different kinds of space in painting beyond direct representation. Informed by a longstanding interest in quantum physics and contemporary philosophies that challenge conventional wisdom in how space, time, and relationships between people, places, and things are or might be understood and governed otherwise, his work has thus become increasingly untethered from the visually recognizable—and also ever more ‘real’ in other respects, as an embodied and unpredictable experience. With the intention to make paintings that question ‘perspective’ in both the spatial and intersubjective senses of the word, Climenhage’s art functions as much as research as representations of wonder at the nature of ‘reality’ and possibilities for relation in an uncertain world.
Based in Peterborough, ON, Climenhage’s life and work have taken him across Canada as well as internationally to Chiapas, Mexico, and Terrasson, France, among other places he has come to know and love. His work is held in public and private collections around the world in countries as varied as Australia, Cuba, El Salvador, England, France, Germany, India, Mexico, Scotland, Spain, and the United States. Climenhage is also a practicing musician who has been performing, writing, and recording for almost four decades, and a passionate educator who has taught students of painting from all backgrounds, both in his studio and previously at Loyalist College, Prince of Wales Public School, the Art School of Peterborough, and the Art Gallery of Peterborough.