Kal Mansur (b. 1965, based in Toronto, Canada) creates abstract works that explore the interplay of colour, translucency, and light. Working primarily with plexiglass and acrylic, he constructs layered compositions where planes overlap, recede, and reveal themselves gradually, producing effects that shift with time of day and the movement of the viewer.
Iterative in conception, Mansur’s works expand the language of abstraction through procedures of layering, excavation, and doubling. What first appears as rigid geometry dissolves into mutable fields of colour and shadow, evoking both painterly depth and sculptural presence. His palette — at times saturated, at times spectral — underscores an enduring preoccupation with perception: how vision is conditioned by transparency, reflection, and the limits of seeing.
Mansur belongs to a lineage of artists who investigate light as material, yet his work is distinguished by its precision and restraint. If his constructions recall the optical experiments of the Light and Space movement, they also align with traditions of colour field painting in their expansive chromatic subtlety. Like Helen Frankenthaler’s fluid surfaces or Richard Diebenkorn’s ethereal structures, Mansur’s pieces hold in tension clarity and flux, order and dissolution.
His practice has developed across series such as Future Summaries, Sojourns, Escape, Valkyries, Stroke Paintings, and Non-Specific Objects, each refining questions of concealment, revelation, and spatial ambiguity. The works resist final resolution, instead sustaining a condition of open possibility — objects that remain alive to shifting contexts and perceptions.
Mansur’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Toronto, New York, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Doetinchem, and was featured at the Canada Pavilion at Expo Dubai 2020. He has completed major commissions for Tiffany & Co., Le Meridien New York, Sammarco Toronto, Hines Tridel Aqualuna, the Conrad Los Angeles, Bonjour Capital, and Fairmont Hotels. Institutions such as George Brown College and Toronto Metropolitan University have acquired and installed his work in public-facing spaces, while his pieces also form part of the collections of Global Affairs Canada, TD Bank, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Alliance Capital, and Senvest Corporation. He lives and works in Toronto.
At once disciplined and sensuous, Mansur’s art continues to redefine abstraction for the present moment: luminous constructions that turn light into matter, and matter into an experience of vision itself.
