Spikes Red, 1977

Born in Alberta in 1942, Bruce O’Neil belongs to the prairies abstraction movement of the 1970s. He began his career in figurative painting, studying under the influence of Canadian artist Ronald Spickett at the Alberta College of Art and Design. He gained recognition as one of the most accomplished abstract painters in Alberta in the 70s with his abstract landscapes. In his book Abstract Painting in Canada, Roald Nasgaard comments on O’Neil’s recurring use of the “wedge,” or a projectile shape driven through the middle of many of his works. Nasgaard also notes that the seminal American critic Clement Greenberg viewed and admired O’Neil’s work at an exhibition called The Canadian Canvas, in 1975. (303) Throughout the 1970s O’Neil also exhibited at the Edmonton Art Gallery, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and the Mira Godard Gallery in Montreal.