Windows: Philip Clairmont

“There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."
Leonard Cohen, Anthem, 1992

This exhibition considers the recurring presence of the window in the work of Philip Clairmont (1949–1984), not as a subject alone, but as a persistent and evolving motif: architectural, psychological, symbolic. Long associated with the charged interiors, mirrors, and wardrobes that defined his early breakthroughs, Clairmont’s window works open another kind of space. They offer views both outward and inward, into rooms, colour, memory, and states of mind.

Spanning the full arc of his brief, intense 12-year career, Windows brings together a focused body of paintings, drawings, prints, and archival fragments. It highlights some of Clairmont’s most luminous and lyrical late works, many never before shown publicly, alongside early explorations and related forms. These are works rich in colour and gesture, often suffused with a hard-won clarity, at times hovering between resplendence and unease.

This is not a retrospective, but a speculative gesture, a show that imagines what might have followed had Clairmont lived into 1984-85. The window becomes a way to think about vision, legacy, and passage — about frames and thresholds, openings and endings. It invites us to re-engage with Clairmont not only as an artist of interiors and intensity, but as one also seeking illumination, space, and transformation.