While serving as a Canadian war artist in Europe during the Second World War, Alex Colville (1920-2013) was immersed in the overwhelming nihilism and horror of the period, witness to the enactment of humanity's darkest possibilities. Colville's war-time experience ultimately animated his remarkable painting career. The style of representational painting he developed-where realism is heightened by the artist's assertion of order through composition-expresses the tenets of his personal revolt against chaos and despair; if these prospects lurk in even his most intimate, domestic images, so also do order and hope, charging Colville's art with tension and vitality.