Sky Glabush at Alison Jacques, London: Landscape Painting Built from Oil, Sand and Slow Looking

Some landscape painters chase a view; others wait for one to arrive. Sky Glabush’s “If the wild bird could speak” at Alison Jacques in London belongs firmly to the second kind. Running from 20 November 2026 to 9 January 2027 at the gallery’s Cork Street space, it is the Canadian painter’s first exhibition with Alison Jacques, which announced its representation of him earlier this year — and it arrives as one of the more quietly ambitious painting shows of London’s winter season.

Who is Sky Glabush?

Glabush was born in 1970 in Alert Bay, a small island community off the coast of British Columbia, and today lives and works in rural southwestern Ontario. The gallery traces his attention to landscape back to a childhood split between two very different Canadas: the coastal rainforests, mountains and fjords of British Columbia on one side, and the open grasslands of Saskatchewan on the other. Anyone who has stood in both places knows the contrast — one landscape crowds in on you, the other runs away to the horizon. That tension between enclosure and expanse is a useful key to the new work.

London audiences may have met him before: his artist page notes his inclusion in “The Sun and the Moon – Art Inspired by the Celestial” at Saatchi Gallery. Beyond that, the gallery’s published material focuses on the paintings rather than a long CV, and we will do the same.

Oil, sand and a painting that keeps changing its mind

The most distinctive thing about Glabush’s technique is physical. He mixes sand into his oil paint, producing surfaces that read almost as low relief. This is not a gimmick: grit changes how light falls across a painting, catching on ridges and sinking into hollows, so that the picture shifts as you move in front of it. In landscapes of forests and fields — subjects that are themselves all texture and flicker — the material does a great deal of the descriptive work before any shape is recognised.

His process is just as unpredictable. According to the press release, each painting begins from a loose structure that breaks down, sometimes vanishes entirely, and then returns in a form the artist did not plan. He finds images rather than designing them, and compares the process to the way a folktale mutates each time it is retold. As he puts it, “The materials themselves have to guide the painting.” For painters, that sentence is worth sitting with: it describes a practice in which the surface is a collaborator, not a screen.

What you will see at Alison Jacques

The exhibition is built around large canvases of the Great Lakes, forests, dense vegetation and sunflower fields, balanced by a group of smaller, more intimate paintings. The gallery has not published a total number of works, but the two scales suggest two modes of looking: the big pictures are designed to be walked into, the small ones to be leaned towards. The gallery frames the whole group as meditations on presence rather than portraits of particular places — so do not expect to identify a specific shoreline or field. Expect instead the feeling of having stood somewhere for a long time.

The cover image, The tipped cup of the moon (2026), hints at the register: a title that sounds like a line of poetry rather than a place name. That is no accident.

Two unexpected influences: Emma Lake and the poets

The press release names two sources that are worth knowing before a visit. The first is the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops in northern Saskatchewan, which ran from 1955 to 1970 (and in other forms until 2012) and brought figures such as Barnett Newman, Clement Greenberg and Frank Stella to the Canadian prairie. It is a fascinating lineage for a landscape painter to claim: Emma Lake is usually remembered as an outpost of American abstraction, yet here it feeds work that is unmistakably rooted in observed nature. Glabush’s paintings sit precisely on that seam, where a field of sunflowers can also be a field of marks.

The second influence is poetry — Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and the Canadian poet Al Purdy. The gallery is careful to say that he absorbs their rhythm and tone rather than illustrating their texts. Hughes and Heaney in particular wrote nature as something dense, muddy and alive rather than picturesque; that sensibility suits a painter who builds his skies and forests out of sand.

Why this show matters for collectors and painters

A debut exhibition with a new gallery is always a moment to watch. For collectors, it is the first opportunity to see a full body of Glabush’s work presented in London under this representation, across two clearly different scales. Pricing and availability are not published, so enquire with the gallery’s sales team. For painters, the show is a lesson in how material choices can carry meaning: sand is not just texture here, but a way of making light behave like weather on the canvas.

Cork Street itself adds context. The street has long been a byword for Mayfair’s commercial galleries, and a winter visit can easily combine Alison Jacques with other openings around Bond Street, Dover Street and Savile Row.

Visiting information

Alison Jacques, 22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG. 20 November 2026 – 9 January 2027; preview on Thursday 19 November, 6–8pm. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am–6pm, and Mondays by appointment. Check holiday closures with the gallery. Telephone +44 (0)20 7631 4720, email [email protected].

Read the official exhibition page, see our exhibition listing for full details, and browse more London, Paris and Istanbul openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.