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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.

EXHIBITION: The Contingent Image: John Climenhage with Critical Distance

September 20, 2025 - November 15, 2025

The Contingent Image comprises three large-scale wall-based assemblages of 170+ paintings selected from a series of over 250 panels. Following a decisive moment of artistic reckoning during which Climenhage destroyed a number of his own past works, the artist has painstakingly reworked, and later began piecing together, a new way to make painting out of this proverbial wreckage. Proliferating across the walls to encompass the viewer, the assemblages evoke the art historical sublime in their sheer scale and striking visuality. Yet this work was never intended as a grand gesture but rather has slowly accumulated through an intimate and ongoing process of search, recovery, and reflection in the wake of grief—and not just for that momentary lapse of faith in art, but as it became compounded by deep personal loss (the still-unsolved killing of close friend and long-time artistic collaborator Jeremy Gordaneer in 2021), and broader disheartenment at humanity’s capacity for destruction—at both individual and international scales. As such, The Contingent Image marks a moment of desire, akin to that of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, “to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.” Against the storm that drives us “irresistibly into the future … while the rubble-heap [of catastrophe] … grows sky-high,”1 The Contingent Image synthesizes a lifetime of memory (the tragic, the magic, as well as the mundane), of observation and practice in painting, of relationships and conversations in the arts and beyond, of an enduring concern with issues of geopolitical import, and of a hard-won and finely-honed intuition—evincing a critical approach to improvisation that has become second nature to an artist who has not only painted for over 30 years but has also been a practicing musician for a decade longer. 

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