John MacGregor

(1944 - 2019)

Born in England, he came to Canada in 1948 and attended the Toronto Central Technical School. He held his first one-man show at Hart House Art Gallery, Toronto. Robert Fulford described his drawings and other objects as follows, “MacGregor turns zippers, vegetables and mountains into sex symbols. ‘My purpose’, MacGregor says, ‘is not to make erotic statements but draw analogies with familiar objects which are essentially sexual in meaning.’ What we see in the Hart House show is a free imagination ranging over the whole world of things and people. It makes a fascinating as well as comic spectacle.” MacGregor has held subsequent exhibitions at the Isaacs Gallery, Toronto (1968) (1970), where his work of sculptured wood fantasies (stairways, arcing doors, joined arcing door and chair, split chairs, fur covered chairs and tables, broomsticks and clocks) have been received with mixed feelings by critics and the public.

Source: "A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume 4: Little - Myles", compiled by Colin S. MacDonald, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd, Ottawa, 1978