Art to See in 2023

A sneak peek at upcoming shows across the country.

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Prepare for the unexpected. The Vancouver Art Gallery is planning a fashion show unlike anything that has ever graced a Paris runway. With dresses made on 3-D printers and crystal fashion accessories produced from human sweat, Fashion Fictions is surely one of the must-see exhibitions of 2023.

While other significant exhibitions are in the works across the country – including tributes to mark the centenary of the birth of Jean Paul Riopelle and a slew of fascinating Indigenous projects – Fashion Fictions may be one of the most daring and innovative, taking visitors down a futuristic catwalk where art and fashion meet science and technology.

The show, which opens May 27 and continues to Oct. 9, features, robotic garments from Montreal-based designer and artist Ying Gao, a “provocative distortion” of conventional forms by designer Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons) and wearable art from Ojibwe visual anthropologist Celeste Pedri-Spade that unites Anishinaabe designs and materials with colonial women’s attire “to imagine an alternate history.” And those crystals made with sweat? They are by London designer Alice Potts. 

Most Canadian galleries are offering little that even gives a casual wink to the “blockbuster” label. The uncertainty of the pandemic means the huge price tags of major programming undertakings come with a sizeable risk.

Still, Jean Paul Riopelle opens Oct. 27 at the National Gallery of Canada and runs to April 7, 2024. The talk around town is that the gallery had to be persuaded to embark on that venture by a group of the Quebec artist’s most influential fans. 

The exhibition, which will include works by some of Riopelle’s contemporaries, is part of coast-to-coast celebrations marking the 2023 centenary of the artist’s birth. Along with the Ottawa retrospective, there will be several exhibitions in Quebec and other events, yet to be announced, in Western Canada.

“We are preparing the most ambitious tribute ever paid to a Canadian artist, with programs deployed coast to coast and internationally,” Manon Gauthier, executive director of the Riopelle Foundation, said after a recent trip to Vancouver. 

The National Gallery promises a show that includes acclaimed works along with others that are rarely seen.

“This major exhibition examines the 20th-century artistic pioneer through a 21st-century lens and showcases Riopelle as a tireless experimenter and innovator, anchored in the contemporary realm,” it says. “Drawing on photographic, film, sound and music resources and the artist’s oeuvre across various mediums, the narrative will present Riopelle anew as it challenges some of the pervasive assumptions about his life and work.”

Meanwhile, Indigenous shows have been taking the spotlight recently and the coming year looks like no exception. 

In a survey exhibition at Calgary’s Nickle Galleries, David Garneau documents his Métis heritage and his struggle to shape a contemporary Métis identity. His paintings, video and works in other media focus on the Métis resistances of 1870 and 1885, which impacted the lives of his great-great-grandparents, Laurent and Eleanor, whose name is reflected in Edmonton’s Garneau district. The exhibition by the Regina-based artist runs from Feb. 2 to April 22.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery – Qaumajuq is offering Inuit Sanaugangit: Three Centuries of Inuit Art from April 1 to Jan. 7, 2024. Those who think Inuit art was “invented” in the 20th century simply to delight tourists could be in for a surprise.

At the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, Indigenous artists Tanya Lukin Linklater and Tiffany Shaw present recent work in the exhibition My mind is with the weather from Feb. 26 to April 22. These multimedia works consider how colonialism is registered in architecture, song and the body while highlighting acts of resistance.

Nick Sikkuark: Humour and Horror, is at the National Gallery of Canada from Nov. 17 to March 24, 2024. During a 30-year career in the Arctic community of Kugaaruk, the late Inuit artist created fantastical sculptures and drawings. 

Ariel Hill of the Six Nations and Wiikwemikoong First Nation has a solo exhibition, Lunar Reflections, from Jan. 28 to May 21 at the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ont. Intricately designed glass vessels and beaded pieces explore teachings of “the 13 grandmother moons” found within various Indigenous cultures and the relationship between the natural world and human experiences.

For Indigenous works from afar, check out Portable Universe at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition unites some 400 works that reveal the diversity and richness of Colombia’s Indigenous cultures. Works dating from about 1500 BCE to the present can be seen from June 3 to Oct. 1.

Some other exhibitions of note:

  • The Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton hosts the touring exhibition Esmaa Mohamoud: To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat from Jan. 21 to May 1. This Ontario artist equates pro sports with neo-slavery. Her eye-catching work includes a deep dive into gender identity with outfits that include basketball jerseys atop billowing ballgown skirts.
  • At the Art Gallery of Ontario, Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear, opens in April. The leading German artist made his mark with photographs that range from intimate observations of his daily life to incisive commentaries on larger social issues. This exhibition, his first major show in Canada, includes some 300 works. Tillman won Britain's Turner Prize in 2000. 
  • Toronto artist Shary Boyle's exhibition, Outside the Palace of Me, an extravagant and theatrical touring show, will be at the Vancouver Art Gallery from March 4 to June 4.
  • Hungry? Vancouver’s Svava Tergesen photographs food arranged in decorative patterns, changing the emphasis from nourishment to pure visuality. Her exhibition, Ornamental Cookery, part of the Capture Photography Festival, is on view at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, B.C., from April 1 to June 11. Tergesen will create a site-based work using vinyl images applied directly to the museum walls.
  • The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver is showing Deanna Dikeman: Leaving And Waving, a series of photographs that show the American artist waving goodbye to her parents from her car. Over the years, her parents age, along with her son, who leaves his baby seat to eventually drive the family car. It runs from Jan. 19 to April 2.
  • The Esker Foundation in Calgary is staging two exhibitions this winter. Ragnar Kjartansson: The Visitors is a large sound and video installation consisting of nine audio and video channels that document a single-take musical performance. Margaux Williamson: Interiors features 40 paintings by the Toronto artist that focus on interior spaces that are comfortably familiar yet strangely disorienting. Both shows run from Jan. 21 to April 30.
  • The Remai Modern in Saskatoon will show Denyse Thomasos: just beyond from April 15 to Sept. 4. The exhibition includes 70 paintings from the late Trinidadian-born artist, who expands the limits of abstraction to explore the trans-Atlantic slave trade and other subjects.
  • From Jan. 27 to May 7, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, presents a solo show by Kathy Slade called As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop. The multimedia artist from Vancouver created a new body of work after a research trip to Sils Maria, Switzerland, where Friedrich Nietzsche spent the majority of his summers during a decade in which he wrote his most enduring works. ■

With files from Joe Paris.

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