Kirk Gower is a visual artist whose practice centres on portraiture and still life painting. Originally from the Sunshine Coast, he now lives and works on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, BC). He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University. Gower’s recent work has been shown at galleries including North Van Arts, Visual Space Gallery, THIS Gallery, the Seymour Art Gallery, and Kariton Art Gallery, as well as the Vancouver Mural Festival. His work has been featured in various publications, including Boooooom, Create Magazine, Visionary Magazine, and Suboart Magazine.

Kirk’s work is grounded in human experience, whether exploring identity markers, his own queerness, or the abstract emotions of love, loss, and anguish. Using traditional painting techniques, he weaves these narratives into sumptuous, highly rendered oil paintings. He then adds various decorative elements to convey meanings and emotions he associates with the figure or objects within a still life painting. The result is often dreamlike or surrealist imagery. Though typically painted in a realistic style, his compositions are deliberately constructed, frequently incorporating his own reference images collected over decades and reassembling them into new forms.

Kirk is equally captivated by the very substance of his work, oil paint. A highly technical painter, he explores how variations in style elicit different responses from the viewer. He is drawn to the tension between realism and artifice, fascinated by the push and pull along this invisible boundary. At the heart of his practice lies a reminder: what the viewer sees is an entirely fabricated composition, a deliberate construction rather than a depiction of reality.