Sylvia Safdie | John Heward

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“Sylvia Safdie | John Heward,” 2025

installation view (courtesy of the Gallery)

Paul Kuhn Gallery is pleased to present a joint exhibition of Sylvia Safdie and John Heward (1934-2018). As husband and wife, Safdie and Heward shared their combined home and studio in a unique architectural space in Montreal. Working along side each other, they benefited and learned from the others’ artistic process and vision.

As a painter, sculptor and musician, Heward is recognized internationally in the circle of free jazz as an Emeritus percussionist. Throughout his prestigious career Heward enjoyed more than 40 solo art exhibits, notably in Paris, London, Chicago and New York.  In 2012 the Government of Quebec awarded him the Borduas prize for visual arts.

This new exhibition includes small black/white paintings, works on paper and a recto verso painting on rayon which hangs freely from the ceiling. Primarily self-taught and having few pre-conceptions, Heward experimented freely.  His calligraphic markings are at once graceful and brutal, fierce and delicate. The play between tension and release is the central dichotomy of his art.

Sylvia Safdie’s artistic practice includes the genres of painting, sculpture, drawing and video. Gathering is the essence of her work; unified by the elementary nature of the materials she collects. Safdie relishes in the strange and surprising effects of these materials. The seemingly disparate objects form and enhance each work, investing it with richer meaning.

This exhibition focuses on her Tree Series, which are oil and graphite drawings on vellum. Viewed as a whole, the show seems to capture the essence of tree and its implicit context within nature and the artist’s imagination.  Both fragile and resilient, each image is unique, mysterious, at once timeless and time specific in their embodiment of nature.