Kathy Ager is a Canadian-born oil painter based in Vancouver. Her work has been featured in Juxtapoz, Print, High Fructose and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine. Brand collaborations include Nike, Polo Ralph Lauren, NOCTA, and Real Skateboards.

Ager creates detailed still lifes that feel simultaneously Baroque and acerbically modern. Inspired by the 17th-Century Golden Age of Dutch and Spanish painting, her imagery uses historical visual rhetoric to deliver intensely personal and emotively charged themes.

The seductive darkness with which Ager reveals universal human longings is both disarming and consuming. Broken hearts are offered up as organs in a bowl, skeletal memento mori abound, and dating feels about as abject in the modern world as butchery; books are stacked with suggestive spines, and flowers wither while fruit threatens to decay. The abattoir is never far from the transcendent ambitions of classical statuary in Ager’s world, while beauty is embroiled in the vulnerability of intimacy and self-exposure.