Michael Canning: Subterfuge

REITER presents Subterfuge, a new solo exhibition by Irish painter Michael Canning, on view at the gallery’s Berlin space from 19 June to 25 July 2026, continuing Canning’s long-running focus on the marginal flora of the Irish countryside.

Canning paints weeds like they’re aristocracy, and after a few rooms of this show, you start to see his point. The plants that anchor these paintings — stylized, sentinel-straight, plonked dead-center against gradient skies sliding from midnight blue to sunset pink — are the ones everyone else steps over. A dandelion, a foxglove, a stray thread of willowherb, et cetera. Canning gives them the full portrait treatment anyway.

What Canning actually paints, again and again, seems to be an argument about worth. His subjects are deliberately unglamorous — the uncultivated, the unbred, the botanically unremarkable. The plants function more as emblems than specimens, standing in for everything that gets overlooked, trampled, or weeded out without a second thought. There’s an irony running underneath it too: a painter trained as a sculptor who refuses volume, flattening his subjects into silhouette and treating the horizon behind them as pure atmosphere rather than actual place. The effect is a landscape that feels emotionally specific while staying geographically anonymous — Ireland in mood, nowhere in particular, in fact.

Michael_Canning, The Complete Stranger, 2026. Oil and wax on canvas — 183 x 122 cm. Courtesy REITER © Michael Canning

Michael_Canning, An Alibi, 2026. Oil on canvas — 50 x 35 cm. Courtesy REITER © Michael Canning

Michael_Canning, The Things We Saw III, 2025. Oil on gesso on panel — 25 x 18 cm. Courtesy REITER © Michael Canning

Michael_Canning, Aviary Drawing, 2026. Mixed media — 38 x 31 cm. Courtesy REITER © Michael Canning

 

 

Subterfuge plays that argument out across several distinct bodies of work. The core of the show is — as expected — a series of single-plant portraits, each one centered and upright against a sky sliding through dusk or dawn color, repeated with enough discipline that the sky starts to feel like the variable and the plant like the constant. Alongside these, a pair of monumental tableaus takes the same premise to a much larger scale — a forest of pine trunks rendered almost entirely in silhouette. A second, rougher pairing, intimate in scale, swaps that clarity of line for something more weathered and ashen, a grittier register that sits oddly and effectively against the more polished pieces nearby. A set of smaller, looser bird studies breaks from the show’s overall formality — quicker, more graphic, meandering on as every artist does.

It’s a niche kind of ambition, building an entire practice on the dignity of things nobody bothers to name. What does Canning actually want us to take away — some sustained way of seeing, a kind of solace for what’s been forgotten? I’m not sure it matters. I left the show unable to identify a single plant species, botanical layman that I am, and their portraits stayed with me anyway. That, I suspect, is the compliment he was after all along.

For more information, please consult REITER’s website here →

Last Updated on July 9, 2026