Dennis Ekstedt is a painter who lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. He received his Diploma in Fine Arts in 1986 from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, B.C and his M.F.A in 1993 from Concordia University in Montreal. He was the Eastern Canada winner of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2002 and his paintings are included in many public, corporate and private collections in Canada and internationally. He has exhibited in Canada, France, United Arab Emirates and the U.S. and has received artist grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec. His work is included in the publications Carte Blanche Vol 2-Painting (2008) and The RBC Painting Competition: 10 years (2008). He has worked with many art consultant firms and is represented by Herringer Kiss Gallery in Calgary, Canada and Mark Moore Fine Art in Los Angeles, U.S.A. 

 

Dennis Ekstedt’s work explores how electric light represents the human habitation of our planet. In his past paintings of nightitme cityscapes Dennis depicted cities as networks of light. The artist is fascinated that humanity can manifest itself as a kind of nervous system of electric light. For him, electric light appears to physically occupy the landscape when in fact it is ethereal and ephemeral - it transcends the physical and evokes our experience of cosmological phenomena.

 

Dennis’ newest paintings depict events of luminous phenomena. Many of the paintings portray the moment where a silhouetted figure witnesses these events. These paintings are inspired by the paintings of the Romantic Sublime such as the Tonalists and Casper David Friedrich but represent a contemporary moment. The presence of these observers suggests uncanny encounters with the natural or artificial world. At the same time, there is a possibility that these encounters may also be a projection of the observers’ own consciousness.