Aba Bayefsky in Kensington Market

Aba Bayefsky is one of Canada’s most senior and well-known artists. He received the Order of Canada in 1979. His works hang in galleries in Canada, the United States, Israel, and India.

“Aba Bayefsky’s life-long affection for Kensington Market has emerged in three distinct creative periods – the 1940s, where he painted his dramatic and forceful watercolours of a Jewish merchant community that then dominated the areas; the late 1970s when he drew his first pencil impressions of a gradually changing ethnic scene; and this latest group of drawings created between the early spring of 1990 and the summer of 1991.”

“These drawings represent both a celebration and a requiem. Kensington, as Bayefsky has known it, is inexorably changing, even disappearing. Together his market drawings compose both a vivid portrait of a vanishing place and a memorable creative statement. Other Canadian artists have chosen to celebrate a given neighborhood or city, but I know of none who has been more constant in his attentions, or evocative in his interpretations.”
Paul Duval