July 7 – August 29, 2026

Heward Printmaker

Atelier-Galerie A. Piroir

In Person Viewing:
5333 Avenue Casgrain, Suite 802
Montréal H2T 1X3 Canada

Online Viewing:
https://www.piroir.com/en/gallery

Opening reception Thursday, July 9 at 5:30 PM

John Heward (1934-2018) was an exceptional painter, sculptor, poet and musician. He was equally a consummate printmaker. Here we celebrate the corpus of intaglio prints that, beginning in the early 1990s, he produced in collaboration with his colleague and friend Paul Machnik, working in Paul’s Studio PM in Montréal.

Paul has likened how John and he interacted in the studio to how musicians riff off one another in a jam session. Such a partnership was fully compatible to John, who thrived on spontaneity and free experimentation and revelled in unexpected results.

Heward’s prints at first glance may seem to be almost nothing – haphazard residues of blobs and marks, noisy plate tones and messy edges – invested in neither tidiness nor technical finesses. But then, look, just when we register their tentativeness, each print takes on a distinctive stance and an evocative bearing. It may be abstract, or elsewhere: out of a scribbly head, emerge the saddest of downcast eyes.  Then there is the physical presence of the prints: not only their heavy paper, not just the deep impressions of the steel plates, but also the heft of Heward’s markings. Heward’s nonchalance redefines itself as a powerful expressive force.

Roal Nasgaard.