Jack Chambers and Mary Pratt are two of Canada’s most recognized photorealist painters. Renowned for their paintings of everyday life — from kitchen tables to suburban streetscapes — they each turned the intimate into the extraordinary through their singular attention to detail and use of light.
Mary Pratt and Jack Chambers: The Lives of Others brings together, for the first time, the work of these iconic artists in both a book and an exhibition. In this beautifully produced and revelatory publication, Renée van der Avoird and Andrew Kear explore the paintings of Pratt and Chambers as intimate revelations of the human condition — their depictions of everyday life, their individual approaches to gender, their attitudes toward grief and illness, as well as their individual processes of image making.
Accompanied by reproductions of more than 70 paintings and works on paper from private and public collections as well as archival materials and source photographs, this volume offers a rare reassessment of the work of these extraordinary artists.
Mary Pratt and Jack Chambers: The Lives of Others accompanies an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which opens on July 28, 2027, and continues until January 21, 2028.
Mary Pratt was born Mary West in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in 1935. Celebrated as one of Canada’s finest painters, Pratt is known for her photorealistic paintings of domestic subjects imbued with compelling emotional complexity. She studied drawing and painting at the University of New Brunswick and later attended Mount Allison’s School of Fine and Applied Arts in Sackville, where she thrived amongst professors and peers working in the milieu of Atlantic Realism. Pratt lived in Newfoundland for most of her 50-year career. She died in St. John’s in 2018.
Born in London, Ontario, in 1931, Jack Chambers was a painter and filmmaker. One of the most influential Canadian artists of his time, he studied in Madrid in the 1950s, where he was inspired by Surrealism and learned classical Spanish and European painting traditions. He returned to London in 1961 and became a leading member of the city–s regionalist art movement, evolving his theory of Perceptual Realism in the late 1960s. Chambers was diagnosed with leukemia in 1969 and died in London in 1978.