Mashel Teitelbaum (1921-1985) was a Canadian artist who never quite fit in to the conventional narratives of Canadian art. An outsider from an early age, Teitelbaum was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan lived in Vancouver and San Francisco in the late 1940s/early 1950s, Montreal in the early 1950s and, from 1953 until his death, in Toronto. Teitelbaum studied in San Francisco with Clyfford Still and Ad Reinhardt at the California School of Fine Arts, and at Mills College with Max Beckmann. He had numerous one-man exhibitions across Canada, and participated in a range of group exhibitions. His work is represented in public galleries and museums across Canada including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Remai Modern, The Vancouver Art Gallery, and many others.

Teitelbaum painted from a young age, and began exhibiting in group exhibitions in the mid-1940s. In 1946 he and Bill Perehudoff had a two-person exhibition at the Saskatoon Art Centre. His work was stylistically varied, with a strong expressionist sensibility. He negotiated back and forth between landscape, portraits and abstract paintings, often working in series, completing a project, pausing and then moving on. No two exhibitions looked the same, but all were bound by a fierce energy and engagement with the qualities of paint itself. After a notable career as an abstract painter (in 1964 he won the Royal Canadian Academy’s Award of Merit in a completion juried by Willem Sandberg director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam), Teitelbaum developed a series of exhibitions utilizing acrylic paint fields, that were manipulated in collage-like abstract and figurative compositions. Towards the end of his life, he turned to the Canadian landscape, rethinking the work of the Group of Seven and other artists to interpret Canadian painting traditions in new ways. At his death, he was planning a series of figurative paintings of models in the studio.