ROBERT BAILEY
Western Living Icon Award
ON VIEW AT INFORM · SEPT 10 – NOV 6
ART COURTESY OF ADDITION
Robert Bailey
There's a particular kind of interior that doesn't compete with the art inside it: it makes room for it. Robert Bailey has spent a career building rooms like that. Named a 2026 Western Living Design Icon, he works in tone-on-tone palettes and layered material, the kind of restraint that looks simple until you try to do it yourself.
It's an approach that suits a gallery's instincts more than most interior design does. Bailey's spaces aren't backdrops. They're compositions, considered the way a curator considers a wall, where every material earns its place and nothing is there by accident. His 2001 design for Vancouver's Opus Hotel still holds up for the same reason a good painting does: it wasn't built around a trend, so it didn't age with one.
That same sensibility hasn't stayed confined to four walls. Bailey's projects have ranged from waterfront homes to the interior of a private plane, and his collaborations have extended to work alongside some of the Pacific Northwest's most notable architectural practices, the kind of range that comes from a designer who treats every project, regardless of scale, with the same discipline.
That sensibility is exactly why this pairing makes sense. A Bailey interior and a Geoff Rees canvas share a logic: both are built on tone, gesture, and the discipline to leave things unresolved rather than overworked. Put them in the same window, and neither one is just decoration for the other.
FEATURED ARTISTS:
Geoff Rees (1930-2018)
Geoff Rees spent five decades teaching Vancouver how to look. A painter and longtime instructor at the Vancouver School of Art, now Emily Carr University, Rees built a body of work defined by discipline: colour and gesture distilled to their essentials, nothing overworked, nothing left to chance.
His eye was shaped early by Japanese woodblock prints and later by years spent travelling through Asia and North Africa, journeys that left him fluent in a visual language most Western painters never encounter: pattern as structure, symbol as substance. What emerged was a body of work suspended between control and spontaneity, emotive brushstrokes and colour held in a kind of quiet animation, never quite settled, inviting the viewer to complete what the painting only gestures toward.
Rees was represented for years by Buschlen Mowatt, one of Western Canada's most influential galleries, and exhibited steadily across the region and abroad. In 1992, that same sensibility earned international recognition when his painting Beneath the Reef won one of the largest prizes ever awarded to a Canadian painter, presented alongside the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. He kept painting daily until his death in 2018, choosing the solitude of the studio over the spotlight it had earned him.
This is the work now on view at Inform: a canvas built the same way Bailey builds a room, through tone, discipline, and the instinct to know when a piece is finished.
Geoff Rees (1930-2018), Untitled, 1989, Acrylic on canvas, Unframed: 51 × 50.5 in, $6,800
Geoff Rees (1930-2018), Untitled, 1990s, Acrylic on canvas, 68 × 77 in, $15,000
Herbert Johannes Josef Siebner, (1925–2003), Stone Head, 1956, Oil on board, $6,5000Herbert Siebner (1925-2003)
Herbert Siebner arrived in Victoria in 1954 with a single Berlin credential that would shape everything after it: he'd trained under Max Pechstein, the last living link to German Expressionism. Two years later, he painted Stone Head, and Victoria had never seen anything like it.
The work turns a human face into something closer to architecture, a single stylized eye set against planes of bone-grey and stark black shadow, where mass and shadow do the work colour usually does. It's less a portrait than a carving in paint, primal in its logic and unmistakably shaped by the Expressionist rooms he'd just left behind. 1956 was the year it all converged: the same year he painted this, he won the Canadian National Award in Graphic Arts and announced himself as a serious new voice on the West Coast.
He spent the next five decades building on it. In 1971, he co-founded the Victoria Limners Society alongside Maxwell Bates and Elza Mayhew, a collective that gave the region's art scene a genuine bohemian center. His work now sits in the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the City of Berlin's own collection, and the private holdings of Princess Fernanda von Thurn und Taxis, a reach that spans continents and speaks to how far his reputation travelled from that first Victoria studio.
It was Lawren Harris who introduced him to the Vancouver Art Gallery in the 1960s, one Group of Seven founder recognizing the next serious voice in Canadian painting. Stone Head predates that moment by a decade, the first proof of a language Siebner would spend the rest of his life perfecting.
Inquire: Additional Siebner Works in Our Private Viewing Room
Ben McLeod
Ben McLeod works from an acreage in the Alberta foothills, where the Rockies are close enough to feel like a collaborator. Steel comes from scrap yards near Cochrane. Some pieces weigh over a tonne and get moved into place by bulldozer. This isn't a studio in any conventional sense, it's a landscape that happens to also produce sculpture.
It started, unexpectedly, with a book. As a young man, McLeod carved a piece in stone; a family member liked it enough to trade him a book on Henry Moore for it. He'd never really considered sculpture before that. He hasn't stopped since.
His process is patient to the point of being unusual. A sculpture can take years to resolve, not because he's slow, but because he refuses to force it. He'll sit with a piece, walk away, come back. At some point he'll look at what he's built and decide only a section of it is actually working, the rest gets scrapped, reassembled, rebuilt around the part that resonated. Sketchbooks fill up alongside the sculptures themselves, thousands of small explorations that reveal a mind working in more dimensions than most: McLeod doesn't seem to see the world flat, and it shows in how his forms hold weight and suggest movement from every possible angle, there's no correct side to stand on.
The results carry the raw honesty of David Smith's welded steel, oxidized surfaces, jagged edges, imperfection left visible rather than sanded away. In stone and wood, he works the opposite instinct: fluid, organic forms that trace directly back to Moore, the same sculptor who set him on this path decades ago.
His sculptures now live in the Canada Council Art Bank, the Alberta Arts Foundation, and the University of Calgary's Nicoll Art Museum, among others. ADDITION has followed his work for years, and this show is the latest chapter in a practice that's still, unmistakably, in motion.Explore
Available Works by Ben McLeod
Ben McLeod, Untitled, 2025, Welded steel and patina, 26 × 9 × 5 in, $5,600