It’s fitting, perhaps, that James Lahey’s latest exhibit features a skull as the lone, prominent motif: the Toronto-based painter has built his career out of turning to styles and subject matter that many in the art world consider long dead. Lahey’s new project revisits a series he began over 10 years ago, when he was given access to a human bone collection at the University of Toronto’s faculty of medicine. These early works placed finely rendered, austere views of bones next to plain fields of colour, or still lifes of flowers or clouds. Lahey’s recent paintings do the same, but in a much darker, blunter way. Skulls hover in the foreground, either against a black background or accompanied by a veiny network of tree branches in silhouette against a gloomy grey. Part of the great memento mori tradition, the works also recall Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors—which contains one of Western art’s most famous skulls, obscured anamorphically between its two subjects. There is, however, no obscuring here: just Lahey’s mortal message, at once time-worn and immediate.

Not For Finding. Artwork $10,000–$26,000. Oct. 4 to 27. Nicholas Metivier Gallery, 451 King St. W., 416-205-9000, www.metiviergallery.com.