A gallery in Prince Edward County, Ontario, is making the case that colour can be structural. Oeno Gallery's exhibition Constructing Space brings together five Canadian abstract painters whose work treats grids, intervals and saturated hues as building materials rather than decoration, and it runs through November 8, 2026.

Milly Ristvedt, born in 1942, starts from grids and works through repeated sequences of colour to test how a visual system can carry feeling as well as structure. Charles Robb, who lived from 1938 to 2023, took a different route: after experimenting with hard-edge painting in the 1960s, he moved towards more lyrical, gestural forms, and the rhythms of his parallel career as a professional jazz drummer can be felt in the improvisational quality of the later work. The show also marks Robb's arrival on the gallery's roster, with his estate now represented by Oeno and a solo exhibition planned for next year.

The exhibition is rounded out by Otto Rogers, whose 1992 painting Night Walk is among the works on view, and two further painters working in distinct abstract languages. Together, the five artists offer contrasting answers to the same question: how does a flat surface suggest depth, movement and place without depicting anything recognisable?

The show sits within a busy period for the gallery. Its four-acre sculpture garden has added at least forty new works to its rotation this year alone, and the gallery returns to Art Toronto from October 29 to November 1. A solo exhibition devoted to another Canadian artist, Fiona Ackerman, titled Winter, opens on November 14.

For visitors, the appeal is the chance to compare five approaches side by side, from strict geometry to loose gesture, and to see how a generation of Canadian abstractionists handled the same basic problem in very different ways.