June 17 – 28, 2026
Reception: Wednesday, June 17, 6 – 9pm
Artist Talk: Sunday, June 28, 2pm | Margaret Glew in conversation with Richard Mongiat
Dupont Rail Gallery, Toronto

Collective City Arts is proud to present Burning Fire Blues, an exhibition by artist Margaret Glew, on view Thursday, June 17 – Sunday, June 28 at the Dupont Rail Gallery. This exhibition is the fifth in a series of eight shows being hosted in the 2026 season by the Collective City Arts Gallery Project.

Artist Statement

Burning Fire Blues is an exhibition of my recent large-scale abstractions. As I head into what may well be my last decade of life, I find myself thinking a lot about what painting means to me. Painting has been the driving force of my life for decades now. It has given voice so to speak to the deep feelings that are difficult for me to put into words.

The paintings in this exhibition are about resilience, persistence, finding a way forward. My paintings start where words fail. Abstraction is its own language, a language of the inchoate, the liminal. It is the expression of ideas and feelings that lie somewhere just beyond consciousness.

My work is intuitive and deeply process driven. Built through gestural brushwork, bold color, and layered surfaces, the paintings evolve over time—often bearing visible traces of revision, erasure, and return.

I explore themes of transformation, growth, and decay, embracing painting as an evolutionary process where destruction becomes a necessary condition for renewal.

About the Artist

Margaret Glew is a Toronto-based Canadian artist. Using a personal language of form and gesture, she makes intuitive, layered abstracts that are metaphors for the emotional landscape we all inhabit.

With over 35 years of artistic practice, Glew’s emotionally charged work has been featured in multiple solo and group exhibitions across Canada and the United States, most recently in a show of recent work at The Modern Toronto this past January.

Her work was featured in Kindred Spirits, an exhibition of abstract painting shown in Greenville, North Carolina, and again a year later at The Painting Center in New York City. Her work is held in numerous public and corporate collections, including the City of Toronto Archives, the City of Scarborough Art Collection, and the Richmond Hill Public Library Art Collection.