Fine Arts Alum Anders Oinonen (MFA '04) has a new show opening on June 5th, 6–9 p.m., at Hunt Gallery in Toronto. The show continues June 5–July 11, 2026.
Across more than two decades, Oinonen has developed a singular language of abstraction, figuration, landscape, and psychological portraiture. His paintings often appear first as arrangements of colour, and form, before resolving into faces, figures, or sentient landscapes.
For his exhibition Unknownun at Hunt Gallery, Oinonen presents a new body of work that continues his long investigation into facial geometry, emotional projection, the instability of looking and the gestural sensibilities of painting. In these paintings, forms hover between apparition and structure: eyes, noses, mouths, hills, masks, lips and shadows emerge through soft washes and luminous colour. The face is never simply a face. It is a place, a weather system, a monument, a joke, a wound, and sometimes a landscape under pressure.
Oinonen’s work has often been described through the language of doubling. His paintings operate in the space between abstraction and figuration, between flatness and depth, comedy and melancholy. Sean Carroll, writing in Artforum, noted the way Oinonen builds “a human face…in planes, vibrating between flatness and perspectival space in uncanny ways,” with “painterly washes” and “opaque geometric shapes” forming a distinctive visage. That vibration remains central to the new work.
Born in Kenora, Ontario, and raised in Northern Ontario, Oinonen’s work carries a strong relationship to landscape, memory, and place. In his 2013 publication Eyebrow Haircut, artist Howie Tsui connected Oinonen’s paintings to the anthropomorphic geography of Thunder Bay and the Sleeping Giant, describing figures that appear as “frail monuments” marked by vulnerability, humour, and an awareness of transience. Tsui also describes the works as destabilizing “dimensionality,” moving between “portraiture and landscape, painting and sculpture,” while monumentalizing “gentle vulnerability.”
This new exhibition extends that emotional and formal terrain. Oinonen’s figures remain strange, tender, and unresolved. They are funny without being light, sad without being sentimental, abstract without abandoning recognition. Their expressions seem to arrive from somewhere just outside language. A sideways glance, a warped symmetry, a soft wash of colour, or a comic eye becomes a way of registering interior life.
Anders Oinonen was born in 1977 in Kenora, Ontario. He received an MFA from the University of Waterloo and graduated from the Ontario College of Art & Design. His solo and two-person exhibitions include Days at The Hole, New York; Family Practice and Phiz at Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto; Eyebrow Haircut at The Hole, New York; People People at Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto; and Sundogs at CTRL Gallery, Houston. His work has been included in exhibitions at Deitch Projects, New York; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; MOCCA, Toronto; The Hole, New York and Los Angeles; and other institutions and galleries internationally. His work is held in public collections including the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, St. Michael’s Hospital, and the Canada Council Art Bank. He is currently represented by The Hole, New York.
Hunt Gallery
1278 St. Clair Ave West, Unit 8
Toronto, ON
Opening Reception
Friday, June 5, 2026 6–9 PM