Nicholas Metivier Gallery is thrilled to present Parklife, an exhibition of paintings by Canadian artist, Ben Reeves, his fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from November 14th through December 12th and there will be a tour with Ben Reeves on Saturday, November 14th at 1 pm, followed by an opening reception through 3pm. RSVP HERE.
In Parklife, Ben Reeves explores the intersections of painting, landscape, and public space. Reeves considers parks as places where nature and culture meet, and where our ideas about the natural world are constructed, negotiated, and continually reimagined.
“While working on Parklife I have been thinking a lot about painting and parks. But my attention is not divided. When I am painting pictures of parks it is the best of both worlds. I am spending time in parks and painting simultaneously. And not idly. I am feeling out the identity and meaning of both spaces. It turns out that parks have a lot to say about painting and vice-versa.” - Ben Reeves
Like parks, paintings offer spaces for sustained attention and reflection. Both are shaped by long histories of how we understand and represent nature, bringing the landscape into the city and the outdoors into our interior lives. In Parklife, Reeves explores these parallels through a varied painterly language, moving between pointillist marks, scraped and layered surfaces, and moments of observational realism. The paintings shift between the tangible and the fleeting, revealing landscape as something at once material, constructed, and continually in flux.
Human activity animates these scenes: people picnic, sunbathe, read, play games, and gather beneath illuminated trees. Recreational spaces become sites where cultural histories and social conventions are embedded in the landscape, from the geometry of sports fields to the rituals of leisure and play.
In Parklife, Reeves invites us to consider parks and landscape paintings as more than places of respite or representation. Both are shaped by competing ideas about nature, ownership, access, and belonging. At a moment when questions of land, ecology, and public space are increasingly urgent, these spaces offer a way to examine our relationship with the environments we inhabit—and the cultural and political values that shape them.
