Moreno, 1982

Private Collection, Toronto

Robert Fulford, ‘An Appreciation of Graham Coughtry’, “The Globe and Mail” [online], January 16, 1999

Graham Coughtry made a name for himself during the late 1950s, exhibiting with Michael Snow at Hart House, University of Toronto in 1955, holding his first one-man show at Avrom Isaacs’ Greenwich Gallery in 1956, followed by his acceptance to include a work in the Second Biennial of Canadian Art in 1957. Finding like-minded colleagues and friends at Isaacs in Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, Dennis Burton, Gordon Rayner, John Meredith and others, Coughtry identified with the boundary-pushing practices of the group and their interests in Dadaism and jazz. Coughtry later became a founding member of the Artists’ Jazz Band with Gordon Rayner and played at gallery events across Ontario. Robert Fulford wrote that for the artist, “modern jazz was as vital as art” and that Coughtry and the band “saw their work running parallel to jazz improvisation. With audacity, confidence, pride, they made their noisy revolution.” The musicality of Coughtry’s expression is magnified within his painterly practice. The rich impasto surface of the figures is in contrast with the wash of burgundy pigments of the background, mirroring the tension and passion between the figures. Coughtry’s exaggerated and abstracted bodies, morphing and separating on the canvas, are never still within the composition; they combine and divide as the viewer’s eye moves over the curved forms. Like the work of Giacometti, Coughtry’s figures retain a visceral tension of the human condition. The work oscillates between opposing binaries of life and death, pain and pleasure, and the abstract and figural.