Kim Dorland: FIST FIGHT #6, 2006 and OZZY

Speaking with Waddington’s, Kim Dorland notes: “you can’t have beauty without unease or else it’s just beauty, and beauty on its own is boring.”

Born and raised in Alberta, Dorland’s work captures ordinary moments, late-night fights, forest edges, and, more recently, a vision of current and future climate hardships. Dorland’s paintings balance figuration and abstraction, often glowing with fluorescent colour and thick impasto.

Two early paintings, both from 2006, Fist Fight #6 and Ozzy, are offered in our 2025 Major Fall auction. Both works draw directly from Dorland’s teenage years in Red Deer, Alberta, and mark a key period in which he began to define his artistic voice.

Fist Fight #6 channels the chaotic spirit of small-town adolescence. “We would meet in a random field somewhere and drink and smoke and fight,” Dorland recalls. “This is based on the most unhinged fight I ever witnessed where the people just seemed to morph into a mass of limbs. I’m the figure smoking in the foreground watching everything unfold.” The painting’s heavy texture and fluorescent tones capture both the physicality and frenzy of the scene, a vivid meditation on violence. Dorland describes this Red Deer period as pivotal, when he “finally knew what [he] wanted to explore” and began to understand what painting could do both narratively and visually.

If Fist Fight #6 embodies chaos, Ozzy reflects a quieter, more surreal vision. Inspired by an alleyway Dorland walked through daily as a teenager, the work represents the strange coexistence of suburbia and wilderness. “Red Deer was the kind of place where you would be walking through a neighbourhood and come face to face with a deer or moose,” he says. “This was a reflection of this.” Through his dense and intensly coloured brushwork, Dorland captures that moment where the familiar meets the wild, an ordinary suburban landscape charged with mystery and unease.

The two works are milestones in his career. Fist Fight #6 and Ozzy reveal Dorland’s ability to turn personal moments into art, to both guide his imagery and connect with audiences: “I think that any great work of art has something mysterious and visually impactful regardless of content. The artwork should be able to tell you everything about itself through the act of viewing. No one cares about the write up beside the work to help the viewer “get” the artist’s intent. If it isn’t available through the act of viewing, it isn’t available, period.”

ABOUT THE AUCTION

Our major fall Fine Art auction includes important works by Group of Seven artists Lawren Harris, A.J. Casson, J.E.H. MacDonald, and A.Y. Jackson, a rare Jock Macdonald abstract, early Kazuo Nakamura paintings, Louis-Philippe Hébert’s major sculpture Algonquins, as well as striking works by Sorel Etrog and Walter Yarwood. International highlights include two exceptionally rare sketches by Sir Edward John Poynter for the Maison Dieu’s stained-glass windows in Dover, Alexander Calder’s Red Serpent, along with works by David Diao, Jules Olitski, and Gene Davis.

Bidding Available November 7 – 20, 2025.

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Public Previews

Previews are available at our Toronto gallery, located at 100 Broadview Avenue.

Thursday, November 13 from 10 am to 5 pm
Friday, November 14 from 10 am to 5 pm
Saturday, November 15 from 12 pm to 4 pm
Sunday, November 16 from 12 pm to 4 pm
Monday, November 17 from 10 am to 7 pm
Tuesday, November 18 from 10 am to 5 pm
Wednesday, November 19 from 9 am to 12 pm
Or by appointment.

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