Mike Bayne (b. 1977 Ottawa, Canada) creates miniature Photorealist paintings of overlooked North American scenes, frequently of his childhood town. Capturing every detail from his working photographs, he replicates his subject not only in terms of imagery, but often also in scale, by mimicking the size of actual commercially printed photographs. Bayne’s highly detailed brushwork captures imagery from the everyday and the banal. His depictions of architecture and vehicles render environments locked in a moment of time, devoid of people and movement. Deliberately lacking expressive content, his head-on compositions often feature broad swathes of color in seemingly flattened geometric forms. Visually, his works are at once abruptly realistic, and yet purposefully inorganic.
He received his MFA from Concordia University (2004) and holds combined Bachelor’s degrees in Art History and Fine Arts from Queen’s University Kingston (2001). He has been exhibiting in both Canada and the United States in solo and group exhibitions since 2004 and in 2011 was the winner of the Kingston Art Prize, in addition to grants from the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Noteworthy among his recent exhibitions are Monotony, Catastrophe, Biology, shown in 2023 at Blouin Division, Montreal, Artless, shown in 2020 at Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary, and Public Information, shown in 2019 at Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York. Bayne’s work has been acquired by numerous prominent public and private collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas, The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, Oregon, and the Wieland Collection, Atlanta, Georgia.