David Hanes

Artist Profile

David Hanes (b. 1987, Toronto, Canada). Lives and works in London and Berlin.

David Hanes is a Canadian-American painter who works in oil on canvas from drawings made outdoors. His paintings of forests, shelters, horizons and skies are built from colour and draw on places he has travelled through, sometimes years earlier.

Each painting starts with a small hand-held sketch made on site, recording light, colour and weather. Hanes often keeps these sketches for years before taking them into the studio, where he develops them over weeks of layering into paintings that depart from the original scene. Most canvases are small, around 30 by 24 centimetres, though some works combine many such panels: I Look (2026) measures 235 by 205 centimetres overall. Recent titles include In The Pines, Waiting For The Thaw and Not The End (all 2026). His painting draws on the early Expressionist groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, the Group of Seven’s paintings of the Canadian wilderness, and colour-led painting from Munch and Seurat onward.

Hanes studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and trained in sculpture at OCAD University, Toronto, before completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 2026. Solo exhibitions include Hold On (2024) and Still Alive (2022) at Mott Projects, Catskill, New York, and Gardens of Fate at Emerge Project Space, Pescara (2023). He has shown in two-person exhibitions at McBride Contemporain, Montreal (2025), and White Noise Gallery, Rome (2022). In 2026 his work was included in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London Writes Itself at LBF Contemporary, London, and Among Trees at Villa Schöningen, Potsdam. He was shortlisted for the Hopper Prize in 2025 and received a Mobility Scholarship from the Embassy of Canada in Rome in 2023. A solo exhibition with Pulpo Gallery, Murnau am Staffelsee, is scheduled for 2027.

His work is held in the TD Art Collection and the Seneca Art Collection, Toronto.