SANDRA MANZI
BIO
Sandra Manzi was born and raised in Toronto, and currently resides in Hamilton. She received her Diploma in Fine Arts/Experimental Arts from the Ontario College of Art (now OCADU) in Toronto, and then received a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Guelph. In 1993 she started working at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where she worked for 30 years. During this time she was showing her paintings in various galleries in and around Toronto. In 2022 she moved to Hamilton and now paints full time in her home studio. She is a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council, and has been a finalist for the Boynes Artist Award three times. Her work is represented by galleries in Toronto, Oakville, Hamilton, Seattle and San Francisco. Her paintings can be found in private collections throughout Canada, Europe, and the United States.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I'm a painter specializing in narrative figurative work; capturing everyday life with a focus on intimacy, emotional resonance, and human connection. My work looks at the everyday, mainly within the urban landscape, the culture of the city, and what it means to be a stranger living amongst strangers. I like to walk a lot, particularly around where I live and work, always keeping my eyes open for scenes to paint. You could say that I'm obsessed with romancing the streetscape, and look for scenes where the banality of the everyday is infused with mystery. They are familiar modest daily observances, they are part of the shared experience of living in a city. My paintings originate from observing and then photographing real people and spaces, and transforming these moments into figurative, painterly compositions. Drawing my inspiration from the narratives and subtle poetry within street scenes, work and leisure environments. Sometimes I see something that is just right - people are in the right spot, pass each other at the right moment, the right light happens to be shining, or the figure to background plays off each other perfectly. A lot of my work relies on these fortuitous moments, where things just sort of happen and you're either there and ready for it or not. Through painterly realism, I focus on natural lighting, fleeting scenes and incidental moments in urban spaces, as well as summer leisure activities on promenades and waterfronts. Working with precision in observation and rendering, I explore the upstaged, incidental, and often overlooked moments of everyday life. Sometimes its the way light settles across a table or shines on someone's hair, and at other times it's the visual poetry found in the cacophony that makes up our urban environment. But its always the subtle narratives embedded in ordinary scenes that draw me in. Through figurative painting, I wish to capture the banality of everyday life. Using my own recomposed photographs, I wish to transform fragments of ordinary life into visual narratives conducive to contemplation and the viewer's imagination. Through meticulously and slowly painting this scene, I can hold on to the experience even longer.
Stylistically, I work at the intersection of classical realism and technologically mediated imagery. My paintings are informed not only by lived experience, but also by technology, which is brought together as a means of exploring how technology affects the construction of images. Despite their high degree of realism and meticulous execution, the works retain an independence that clearly distinguishes them from the technical exactivity of photographs. Nevertheless, the snapshot of the moment is something I'm partial to capturing, therefore the photographic reference is never hidden but part of the meaning within the work. Perhaps its the juxtaposition of the speed inherent in the image itself moving quickly in front of me taken by the spilt second of the shutter mixed with the slow meticulous process of painting it. I also create paintings comprised of layers of various images. Here I use digital photo editing software techniques to jumble formal qualities such as abstraction and realistic representation. I do this as a way to trace the effect technology has on the construct of perception. The combination of divergent elements suggests a pluralistic visual experience bridging the historical framework of painting, self, and the influence of technology on image making. As a lover of art history I sometimes blend the works of Old Master painters with images from my lived experience. In this series I bridge the past and present by layering, collaging, and/or cropping elements from these paintings with my everyday observations, blending classical oil techniques and tropes with modern narratives. Grounded in traditional technique, I want these paintings to first capture the magic in our everyday lives, while creating compositions that challenge perception, cultural narratives, and identity. In these oil paintings I blend historical elements with contemporary settings. Digital collaging and various oil painting techniques are employed in an exploration of the fluidity of time and memory. I wish for the depiction of artifacts in contemporary settings to invite contemplation on the relationship between the past and present.
I'm a painter but I love taking pictures either in my own city or in my travels. Sometimes a photograph will turn into a painting in the most unexpected way - inspiring a painting, but not how you'd expect. You never know where you’ll find inspiration. The spark for a painting can come from a very tiny part of a photo that I've cropped from a larger scene. It's those little moments in daily life that really inspire me - an expression on a face, the incidental interpersonal relationships, a lighting on a building or on someone next to a cafe window. I look for facial expressions that tell a universal truth about what it is to be human. Experiences that we can all relate to.
Although painting has always been my first true love, throughout my career photography has always been a part of my process. As I've experimented with merging the two disciplines, this fascination has permeated every aspect of my painting, with various different series developing from it. Recently, the post production process has become an element of one series, where editing and laying images has merged with a more traditional painting process. Another series has to do with my interest in how photography aligns with my interest in perception, hence making the aesthetics of photography part of the subject of the work. By painting photographic elements such a cropped composition, atmospheric lighting, backlighting, and subtle motion blur, the resulting images oscillate between photographic snapshot and painterly interpretation.
I'm always looking for seemingly casual scenes, where spaces may open up for personal observations and stories. The paintings invite viewers to focus on the ephemeral and discover unexpected layers of meaning in everyday situations. Urban life holds a significant influence on my painting practice. Having been born and raised in downtown Toronto, my paintings show a love for the city and the people who inhabit it. As I wander around the city streets with my camera, I focus on the people around me whose life experiences are full of meaning. Hence, my paintings are the result of an obsession with people watching and a highly sensitive predilection for capturing fleeting moments, light, composition and the incidental interrelations between people as private everyday moments are captured in public spaces. The mundane moments in contemporary life nourishes my art and provides me with an abundance of inspiration. I'm interested in expressing how various changes take place in the contemporary world every day. Drawing from photographs taken during my travels and observations, I wish to transform ordinary scenes focusing mostly on anonymous figures in urban and cultural environments, transient everyday situations, and moments caught in passing. My style inhabits a space between painterly surface and photographic perception, with a fascination with both natural and artificial light.
The starting point for my work are photographs of everyday scenes, which I digitally manipulate and then translate into precisely executed paintings. Most of the subjects are people and the space surrounding them in everyday situations, focusing on the inconspicuous interpersonal moments that usually go unnoticed in everyday life. I paint fleeting scenes of urban situations: people commuting to work or participating in a summer festival, people in cafés, on promenades, in parks or beaches, or fleeting encounters between people. Through the deliberate choice of subject matter, monumental formats, and an intensive painting process, my goal is to direct the viewers attention to the significance of the moment and to make the fleeting permanently visible and invite us to perceive the ordinary anew. Characteristic photographic effects blend with the painterly and tactile quality of oil paint, creating a fusion of photographic vision and painterly presence. But by painting such moments, my goal is to remove them from their immediate transience. Between the initial perception and its painterly rendering lies a prolonged lingering over a particular state of the world. Thus, a picture emerges that speaks not only of its subject matter but also of the attention given to it. It allows for a pause in a moment that was originally intended to be fleeting. Within each painting I focus my gaze on states of the world as they can be encountered in the play of light and the movement of people. These are observations that I am particular fascinated with because of their casualness. The images I invite the viewer to engage with are those moments in which the special aesthetic of the seemingly inconspicuous only reveals itself through mindful seeing. Women artists have been capturing everyday moments for centuries - from Berthe Morisot to Gwen John. I love the idea of inheriting that tradition while bringing those scenes into a contemporary context. The starting point for my work is usually photographic images I take, which I later digitally manipulate and transform into hyperrealistic compositions. Through a style I can best describe as painterly realism, I look to capture those moments that are usually only visible for a brief instant before disappearing back into the flow of daily life.
This brings me to another element in my work, which is the question of how perception transforms into memory. My paintings point not only to the fleeting nature of individual moments of perception, but also to the way in which experiences persist in memory. This shows up in my work through overlapping images, details that recede and blend into each other, contours lose their sharpness, while other impressions remain. The paintings emerge from intensive observation of my immediate environment, yet are reminiscent of layers of visual experience. They appear as if perceptions from different moments have coalesced into a condensed memory of the natural space. What remains is not visible nature, but the atmosphere of a place, translated into color, movement, and layering. Yet as the familiar remains recognizable, other elements emerge as independent forms. This creates a visual disruption that alters the viewer's perception of the pictorial space. At the same time, the work points to the way perception has a lasting effect. What remains after a day of observing the world around me are not only memories of specific situations, lighting conditions, and details, but also the awareness of the ubiquitous nature of that moment. Thus, not only a natural space becomes visible, but also the trace it leaves in memory.
These contemplative oil paintings depict everyday scenes of people in the city to highlight the overlooked, understated, and fleeting moments in life, seeking to imbue the everyday with a sense of beauty and grandeur. My paintings combine the tactility of oil paint with the unintended beauty of vernacular photography to create compositions with a sense of ambiguity and open narrative, inviting the viewer to question what they see. Focusing on city life, my paintings convey the innate tension between togetherness and isolation in urban environments. Motifs and subjects such as shop windows, urban architecture, and pedestrians appear as signifiers for the nature of contemporary life.
I find endless inspiration from watching people within our urban built environment. Exploring the symbiosis between public spaces and private life, my paintings invite us to look in on the beauty and poetry of those personal moments which are often overshadowed by the cacophony of modern life. I create observational paintings that capture fleeting moments of everyday life, focusing on familiar scenes and situations. They start as an exploration of form, light, and the underlying narratives of the everyday. I find joy in the particulars of the candid, spontaneous, or unstaged moments that we experience in modern society today. Whether they are as mundane as a walk to work or as an example of our leisure time, they all interest me as symbols of contemporary life. A quote by the Canadian Artist Mary Pratt has always resonated with me: "The reality comes first, and the symbol comes after. I see these things, and suddenly they become symbolic of life". City streets, commuter trains, local summer festivals, pub corners, museum visits, and essentially people, places and things that I happen to come across incidentally - each becomes part of a wider record. I start by photographing the ambiguous realities embedded in daily life. Influenced by street photography and the strange poetry of the everyday, I will crop scenes, holding still the moments most people pass without notice. I'm very much drawn to documenting realistic character interactions, awkwardness, and the mundane realities of everyday life. I constantly take photos and videos of anything I find interesting or particularly beautiful. This documentation becomes my inspiration for my artwork, and I would describe my style as somewhere between photorealism and painterly brushstrokes. I would ultimately define my work as constantly documenting the world around me with my camera, developing a personal view of contemporary life through a figurative and realistic painterly language.
These can be seen as social landscapes: cultural and social observations of the environments we inhabit. They're based on observations of the city especially the people, places, and things I encounter everyday which to me means subjects we generally see as unworthy of attention, overlook or ignore. I recall how as a child growing up in a city where life on the street seemed simultaneously exciting, beautiful and mysterious in its ordinariness. I was drawn to this and have been a sidewalk observer all my life. My paintings investigate the humor, beauty and unintended consequences of city life, and our ambiguous relationship with the natural world within it. The patterns of color and composition that I see within the city are things I paint meticulously and with great attention to detail, playing off painting against the original photograph. There's a type of negotiation between the two mediums that happens as I paint and I've always been interested in the interplay between photographic effects and the painterly possibilities that comes from it. Photographic phenomena such as overexposure, blur, and pronounced contrasts between light and shadow are translated into painting.
Subject wise, when I'm not painting people in the city, I enjoy walking through galleries. I also enjoy the crowds within these spaces and I find them fascinating, especially contrasted against the artwork on the walls. I’m sure that I spend more time taking photographs of people than looking at the artwork as I'm always looking for my next painting within the just-packed-enough museums. Sometimes I will paint florals, landscapes and seascapes, often with figures in the composition. They're detailed explorations of light and shadow, while also being poignant moments of place and our connection to the natural world.
I like to capture different situations in either museums or streets, seeing that these settings are where most cultural and everyday changes take place. The subjects (i.e. the people) in the paintings are usually in motion, unaware of being photographed, so they look natural, with their postures and glances revealing more than they realize. This contributes to the “realness” of what I'm interested in depicting. At the center of my work are scenes from the public realm: bustling pedestrian zones, elegant cafés, dimly lit bars, and recognizable urban spaces where people casually meet, linger, or stroll by day and night. The scenes resemble snapshots or chance moments frozen in time, hiding rich narrative possibilities. It is here that the uniqueness of the everyday becomes apparent—an everydayness that I work to elevate to a monumental scale through large-format paintings and an intensive painting process. Rather than focusing on spectacular events, I'm interested in the quiet intensity of ordinary moments, where paintings serve as documents of a subjective intensification of lived reality. They explore the inconspicuous nuances of human interaction that often go unnoticed in daily life.
GALLERY REPRESENTATION
Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Rental and Sales Gallery, Toronto
Art Interiors, Toronto
Lost In Composition, Seattle, Washington
Christopher Clark Fine Art, San Francisco, California
Noma Gallery, Collingwood, Ontario
Crown and Press Gallery, Hamilton, Ontario
Summer and Grace Gallery, Oakville, Ontario
EXHIBITIONS
2026 - Lost In Composition Galley, 'Subversion – of the dominant art paradigm', Group Show, May 6 – May 31
2026 - Lost In Composition Gallery, 'Debut', Group Show, April 1-May 3rd
2025 - Summer and Grace Gallery, Two Person Show, Oct. 9-26, 2025
2025 - Noma Gallery, Gallery Opening Group Show, June, Collingwood
2025 - 'The Power of She', Group Show, Summer and Grace Gallery, May 1-June 15
2025 - Elaine Fleck Gallery, Two Person Show, April 1-30
2024 - Elaine Fleck Gallery, Christmas Show, December
2024 - Elaine Fleck Gallery, Summer Group Show, August
2024 - Summer and Grace Gallery, A Beautiful Life: Still Life Exhibition, May 30 - July 14
2024 - Elaine Fleck Gallery, Two Person Show, April 6-30
2024 - Crown and Press Gallery, February 3 - 21
2023 - Elaine Fleck Gallery, Toronto, Group Show, December
2023 - Centre3 Gallery, Hamilton, Ont., Solo Show, Nov. 3 - 28
2023 - Elaine Fleck Gallery, Three Person Show, Oct. 4-28
2023 - Elaine Fleck Gallery, Group Show, Sept. 7-30
2023 - Crown and Press Gallery, Hamilton, Ontario
2023 - Paula While Diamond Gallery, "Big Idea Show", July - August
2023 - Square Foot Show - Florals, Online show, May 4 - 6
2023 - Art Gallery of Hamilton Annual Art Sale, Hamilton, Ont., April 27 - 30
2023 - Dundas Valley School of Art 52nd Annual Auction, Hamilton, Ont., April 10 - 15
2023 - Ironwood Cider House, Solo Show, Niagara on The Lake, Ont., April 15 - May 4
2023 - Summer and Grace Gallery, "Joy" Exhibit, Dec. 1, 2022 - Feb. 27
2022 - Paula White Diamond Gallery, "Square Foot Show", Nov. 26 - Dec. 4, Waterloo, Ont.
2022 - Paula White Diamond Gallery, "Big Ideas Show", Oct. 27 - Nov. 12, Waterloo, Ont.
2022 - Art Gallery of Mississauga, Second Annual Juried Show, Sept.13 - Oct. 23
2022 - Summer And Grace Gallery, Oakville, Ontario
2022 - 2023 - Art Gallery of Hamilton, Art Rental And Sales Gallery, Hamilton, Ontario
2022 - Earls Court Gallery, "Bouquet", April 7 - May 7, 2022, Hamilton, Ontario
2021 - 2023 - Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Rental And Sales Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2021 - Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, July 2-11., Toronto, Ontario
2010 - George Brown College Gallery, Three Person Show, Toronto, Ontario
1998 - 2007 - Gallery Moos, Toronto, Group Shows, Toronto, Ontario
2008 - Fran Hill Gallery – “The Portrait Challenge”, Group Show, Toronto, Ontario
2004 - The Burston Gallery, “Crooked Grind”, Solo Show, Toronto, Ontario
2002 - Luft Gallery, “Hockey Card Portraits”, Solo Show, Toronto, Ontario
1998 - West Wing Art Space, “Fleeting Moments”, Solo Show, Toronto, Ontario
GRANTS AND AWARDS
2024 - Boynes Artist Award, 11th Edition Finalist
2022 - Boynes Artist Award, 7th Edition Finalist.
2022 - Boynes Artist Award, 6th Edition Finalist.
2021 - Ontario Arts Council, Exhibition Assistance Grant
2003 -Toronto Arts Council, Exhibition Assistance Grant
2002 - Canada Council for the Arts Grant
2002 - Ontario Arts Council Grant
EDUCATION
1988 - B.A., Fine Arts, University of Guelph
1987 - A.O.C.A., Fine Arts/Experimental Arts, Ontario College of Art and Design
1984 - C.T.S.A.D., Fine Arts, Central Technical School, Department of Fine Arts, Toronto
PRESS
https://italocanadese.org/2025/11/17/the-life-and-art-of-sandra-manzi/
Youtube Interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9KCgditLoM
Boynes Artist Award, 11th Edition Finalist -
"We are delighted to showcase Vintage by Sandra Manzi, a Finalist in the Boynes Artist Award 11th Edition! Description: Inspired by the works of Old Masters, Sandra’s 'Vintage' recontextualizes James Tissot’s painting 'Croquet', blending elements of art history with contemporary figures. As a figurative artist, Sandra captures fleeting human moments that spark bigger questions about identity and what it means to be human. This dialogue between past and present, tradition and technology, creates a timeless and thought-provoking narrative."
https://boynesartistaward.com/interviews/artist-sandra-manzi
https://boynesartistaward.com/interviews/artist-sandra-manzi-updated