Joanne Tod

Canadian, born 1953

BiographyJoanne Tod (b. 1953, Montreal, lives in Toronto) has exhibited her work nationally and internationally for the past thirty years. Evolving from an early interest in Pop art and documentary photography, Tod’s work is widely known for her subject of social critique in the guise of high realism paintings. Since the mid-1970s Tod has used painting as her main source medium. She received her fine arts education at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto (1974) and has taught Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Daniels Faculty. Her works have been collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the AGO, the Musee des beaux-arts des Montreal and UofT, which also holds some of Tod’s portrait paintings in the collection (i.e. Bruce Kidd, Jane Gaskell, Hal Jackman, Michael Wilson, Margaret
MacMillan and Robert Prichard).

Best known for her engagement in topical issues and anxieties of our times, Tod creates hyper realistic backdrops for her surreal, often witty, feminist confrontations with racism, politics, and corporate power. She works on a grand scale: her figurative works tend toward high illusionism, displaying brilliant hues. Through her paintings, she has consistently been critical of the status the medium has held in art history. The most common subjects in her paintings have been women as well as domestic interiors. Various arrangements of these have allowed her to critically comment on as well as explore the ironies of image, power, and glamour in our culture.

Person TypeIndividual