Vikky Alexander: Extreme Beauty at the Vancouver Art Gallery closes January 26, 2020. The first retrospective of Vikky Alexander, whose work interrogates the mechanisms of display that shape meaning, beauty and desire in our culture. Comprising more than 80 works in a variety of media, Extreme Beautyexamines the major themes that have occupied Alexander for more than three decades of her career, including the appropriated image, the artificiality of nature and the seduction of space. Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Daina Augaitis, Interim Director.

Vikky Alexander: Nordic Rock at the Fonderie Darling, Montréal, opens February 27, 2020. Curated by Caroline Andrieux, this exhibition was created in dialogue with the Fonderie Darling’s massive hall. The industrial setting harbours fragile sculptures representing highly stylized elements of design furniture, such as a bed, a chair, a night table. Installed on pedestals and made of dichroic glass, an iridescent material that reflects a spectrum of colour, these extremely delicate sculptures attract viewers and hold their gaze. Like jewels or precious stones capturing and reflecting light, these non-functional objects have a sole aim: to captivate and to create desire.

Discovering Oscar Cahén (1916–1956), opening April 2, 2020 at Feheley Fine Arts/Centre Space, Toronto. In special collaboration with Feheley Fine Arts, TrépanierBaer is thrilled to present an exhibition of outstanding works by Canadian abstract painter and illustrator, Oscar Cahén. A major highlight includes Cahén’s monumental canvas Warrior, completed shortly before his sudden passing by automobile accident in 1956. Fittingly, Warrior’s legacy comes full circle in this exhibition at Feheley Fine Arts, as the piece was originally shown for the very first time at M.F. (Budd) Feheley’s Park Gallery in 1959.

James Carl will be revealing two monumental sculptures commissioned for Calgary, Alberta in the Spring. Stay tuned for more details.

DaveandJenn: A Forest Song at the BMO Project Room, Toronto, on view now until November 27, 2020. Commissioned by the Bank of Montréal, this work has been over a year in the making. A Forest Song is a fantastical avian tableaux that does double duty as an allegory for our times. Stunningly beautiful and disturbing all at once, this installation work is not to be missed. Viewing by appointment only, please call 416-867-5290 or 416-643-2609.

Carroll Taylor Lindoe in REBELLIOUS: Alberta Women Artists in the 1980sat the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, closes February 16, 2020. Curated by Lindsey Sharman, This exhibition reveals the shifting mores of the most tumultuous era in Alberta’s history and includes work by the most influential Alberta artists of the 1980s who continue to shape Canadian art. These artists pushed boundaries with their methods of working, their subject matter, and by expanding the ways in which one could be an artist. Utilizing a range of tactics from satire and humour to social critique these artists exposed and worked against established artistic and societal conventions alike.

Luanne Martineau in Nests for the End of the World at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton from January 25 to May 3, 2020. For this thought-provoking exhibition, the AGA commissioned Luanne Martineau and other artists to envision and create a ‘nest’ to cope with the end of the world; however it may come about. From hopeful and optimistic to humorous and ironic, these ‘nests’ offer reprieve, refuge, rejuvenation and difficult truths.

Kent Monkman at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Kent Monkman’s large 2-painting installation mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) on display until April 2020. Commissioned by the New York museum, the artworks are part of a series which invites contemporary artists to create new pieces inspired by art in the Met’s collection. Monkman is the inaugural artist to be featured in the Great Hall. The work Resurgence of the People offers a fresh interpretation of German-American artist Emanuel Leutze’s iconic oil painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. Monkman re-imagines the scene with his Miss Chief Testickle two-spirited character helping to steer the boat. Meanwhile, the painting Welcoming the Newcomers sees Miss Chief and other Indigenous people greeting arrivals to the shores of North America.

Kent Monkman speaks about his works now on view at the Met on March 31, 2020 at Koerner Hall in Toronto. This talk also concides with the Art Canada Institute’s release of the print book on the artist’s Met project: “Revision and Resistance: mistikôsiwak at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Tickets are available here.

Ron Moppett: Do You Remember/Snow & Stars at Glenbow Museum, Calgary, February 8 – May 24, 2020. Curated by Nancy Tousley, the latest exhibition in the One New Work series presents a giant 22-metre-long wrap-around painting that shines a different light on this celebrated senior Canadian artist.

Ron Moppett in Painting Nature with a Mirror, on view at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal until March 17, 2020. This selective group of 1980s painting in Canada showcases twenty or so paintings and drawings from the collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Alberta-based artist Ron Moppett, from whom  the title of this exhibition is borrowed, spoke eloquently of his reticence to apply discourse to his works: “When we use words, we have correspondences so firmly lodged in our brains, but images have to be much more open. Not meaningless or arbitrary, but generous.”

Herald Nix at Wilding Cran, Los Angeles from January 25 to March 15, 2020. This solo exhibition features more than thirty intimate landscape paintings by the artist. Harold Nix has favored the North Okanagan region in his career as a painter. He makes almost daily trips into the bush around Salmon Arm or takes his rowboat onto the lake to paint using oil on board. In addition to his work as a visual artist, Herald Nix is an acclaimed musician who has performed throughout Canada and internationally.

Danny Singer at the Whyte Museum in Banff, Alberta, from January 31 to April 12, 2020. This exhibition is part of the EXPOSURE 2020 photography festival. Working out of the tradition of documentary photography and using contemporary photographic techniques, Singer records places found in Canada’s western Prairie Provinces and presents them as grand panoramas. Often composed of up to 80 or 100 sequential images digitally conjoined into seamless panoramas, Singer’s photographic works are eloquent and celebratory expressions of western Canadian culture.

Danny Singer in Next Year’s Country at the Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, opening February 1, 2020. Curated by Sandra Fraser, this group exhibition explores ideas of place, belonging and history through a wide range of Canadian artists in Remai Modern’s outstanding permanent collection. The exhibition uses this historical Prairie perspective as a means to consider the impulse to resist the anxiety of the present. How does this impulse influence our desires to return to the past or to dream of the future?

Michael Smith: Le Passage, on view at Oxford Properties Group Centennial Place, Calgary until June 30, 2020. This monumental painting ( three panels,  9 feet x 20 feet overall), is the artist’s attempt to record, in three panels, the history of his personal, trans-Atlantic journey. The left panel references a classic English landscape; in the centre panel he has overlaid a series of maritime images: ships in a gale, rogue waves; and in the last panel he looks north to the Arctic.

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas: Carpe Fin at the Seattle Art Museum, on view until November 1, 2020. Carpe Fin is a major commission for SAM’s collection by Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. This monumental work has been created as a “Haida manga,” a unique approach developed by Yahgulanaas that blends several artistic and cultural traditions, including Haida formline art, Japanese manga, Pop Art, and graphic novels. The artist populates this 6 x 19–foot watercolor mural with figures, landscapes, and action scenes inspired by a traditional Haida oral story.

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Image Credit:
Carroll Taylor Lindoe
Light, Landscape in Yellow and Pink, 1982