BIO
Esther Hoflick is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal, working at the intersection of materiality, memory, and abstraction. She holds a B.A. Honours in Studio Arts from the University of Guelph (2007), with a minor in English Literature, and an MFA from the University of Ottawa (2019).
From 2019 to 2024, Hoflick was a Fine Arts professor and Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Northwestern Polytechnic in Northern Alberta. She is now based in Montreal, where she maintains an active studio practice alongside her teaching.
Hoflick co-founded Night Owl Contemporary, a gallery for emerging artists in Montreal, and directed The Living Art Room, a community-based art school. She is the founder of Sky School of Art, a continuation of this pedagogical work, developed from her long-standing interest in perception-based and process-led approaches to drawing and painting.
She has worked as a curator for Artbomb Montreal and received various provincial grants; her most recent from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at Artspace (Peterborough), the Art Gallery of Guelph, Espace Projet (Montreal), Galerie UQO (Gatineau), Gallery Karsh-Masson (Ottawa) and Doris, (Alberta), among others.
STATEMENT
Recently, I’ve been painting on plaster. The surface is porous and absorbent, pulling pigment deep into itself in ways that echo our own inseparability from the environments we inhabit. For me, painting and drawing are not distinct pursuits but variations of the same act of inquiry—different materials, different resistances, the same attention to perception.
My images hover between representation and abstraction, surfacing and dissolving like half-remembered thoughts. They draw upon the body, landscape, and architecture—not to describe them literally, but to gesture toward how we inhabit space and time. These archetypal forms lead me inevitably toward geometry, colour, and the physics of light: structures that are both rational and ineffable, measurable and yet always escaping full capture. Such fascinations stem from a family lineage marked by inquiry and multiplicity: four matrilineal generations of theosophists; a father who is an architectural draftsman, sailor, and drummer; and a childhood spent barefoot, listening, observing, absorbing. My inheritance was not dogma but a sensitivity to interconnectedness, to alternative ways of knowing that move through the body, the senses, and intuition as much as through intellect.
My interest in theosophy and philosophy is not doctrinal but investigative. They are lenses through which to probe how perception operates symbolically, spiritually, and materially. This is why I have been pairing visual images with sound, embedding whispered recordings and fragments of internal dialogue into certain paintings. By layering language into visual form, I am not illustrating meaning but amplifying the awareness of perception itself—reminding the viewer that seeing is always accompanied by thinking, feeling, and remembering.
I consider each painting and drawing a site of meditation. They are invitations to pause, to linger in uncertainty, to recognize the instability of interpretation. Viewers may sense something rising to the surface, only to doubt whether it was ever there at all. In this flicker between image and ambiguity, I want to reawaken a heightened consciousness of perception—the small but profound realization that what we see is inseparable from what we are, and that our experience of the world is always mediated by body, memory, and attention.
Ultimately, my practice is an act of attunement: a search for the thresholds where image and language, matter and meaning, perception and consciousness converge. By tracing these thresholds, my work points toward the possibility that enchantment—an alertness to the interconnectedness of things—remains available to us in every moment of looking.
Esther Hoflick is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal, working at the intersection of materiality, memory, and abstraction. She holds a B.A. Honours in Studio Arts from the University of Guelph (2007), with a minor in English Literature, and an MFA from the University of Ottawa (2019).
From 2019 to 2024, Hoflick was a Fine Arts professor and Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Northwestern Polytechnic in Northern Alberta. She is now based in Montreal, where she maintains an active studio practice alongside her teaching.
Hoflick co-founded Night Owl Contemporary, a gallery for emerging artists in Montreal, and directed The Living Art Room, a community-based art school. She is the founder of Sky School of Art, a continuation of this pedagogical work, developed from her long-standing interest in perception-based and process-led approaches to drawing and painting.
She has worked as a curator for Artbomb Montreal and received various provincial grants; her most recent from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at Artspace (Peterborough), the Art Gallery of Guelph, Espace Projet (Montreal), Galerie UQO (Gatineau), Gallery Karsh-Masson (Ottawa) and Doris, (Alberta), among others.
STATEMENT
Recently, I’ve been painting on plaster. The surface is porous and absorbent, pulling pigment deep into itself in ways that echo our own inseparability from the environments we inhabit. For me, painting and drawing are not distinct pursuits but variations of the same act of inquiry—different materials, different resistances, the same attention to perception.
My images hover between representation and abstraction, surfacing and dissolving like half-remembered thoughts. They draw upon the body, landscape, and architecture—not to describe them literally, but to gesture toward how we inhabit space and time. These archetypal forms lead me inevitably toward geometry, colour, and the physics of light: structures that are both rational and ineffable, measurable and yet always escaping full capture. Such fascinations stem from a family lineage marked by inquiry and multiplicity: four matrilineal generations of theosophists; a father who is an architectural draftsman, sailor, and drummer; and a childhood spent barefoot, listening, observing, absorbing. My inheritance was not dogma but a sensitivity to interconnectedness, to alternative ways of knowing that move through the body, the senses, and intuition as much as through intellect.
My interest in theosophy and philosophy is not doctrinal but investigative. They are lenses through which to probe how perception operates symbolically, spiritually, and materially. This is why I have been pairing visual images with sound, embedding whispered recordings and fragments of internal dialogue into certain paintings. By layering language into visual form, I am not illustrating meaning but amplifying the awareness of perception itself—reminding the viewer that seeing is always accompanied by thinking, feeling, and remembering.
I consider each painting and drawing a site of meditation. They are invitations to pause, to linger in uncertainty, to recognize the instability of interpretation. Viewers may sense something rising to the surface, only to doubt whether it was ever there at all. In this flicker between image and ambiguity, I want to reawaken a heightened consciousness of perception—the small but profound realization that what we see is inseparable from what we are, and that our experience of the world is always mediated by body, memory, and attention.
Ultimately, my practice is an act of attunement: a search for the thresholds where image and language, matter and meaning, perception and consciousness converge. By tracing these thresholds, my work points toward the possibility that enchantment—an alertness to the interconnectedness of things—remains available to us in every moment of looking.
