The MURAL International Public Art Festival starts on June 4th on the Saint-Laurent Boulevard in Montreal. Media representatives and members of the public are invited to enjoy the numerous activities until June 14th. “With free access again this year to the pedestrian sites, MURAL festivities are spread over a total of eleven days rather than […]
Omer Fast
May 8 – June 19, 2013
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
From May 8 to June 19, 2013, as part of its Projections series, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal is presenting Omer Fast’s work Continuity (2012) in the Beverley Webster Rolph Hall. Omer Fast is among those contemporary artists whose goal is an in-depth analysis of the space and narrative form of cinema. Employing a documentary form that fuses personal accounts, reportages, interviews and reenactments, his films often feature “protagonists” of recent wars and armed conflicts. Continuity a disturbing and unsettling blur of fact and fiction is often described as a work about loss and grief.
Laurent Grasso. Uraniborg
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
February 7 – April 28, 2013
The exhibition Uraniborg offers a unique foray into space and time, two themes that lie at the heart of Laurent Grasso’s approach. The history of observation and its connection to political power also plays a pivotal role in his work and acts as a starting point for a broader examination of seeing, controlling and monitoring, at the same time as it opens up a path to possible worlds.
Pierre Dorion
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
Comprising more than seventy pieces produced since 1994, Pierre Dorion offers a critical overview of the painting of this major Montréal artist. While various authors have quite rightly stressed the important role played by photography in the creation of Dorion’s works, this exhibition focuses on their presentation context rather than their production process. Its starting point is a reconstruction of Chambres avec vues, an exhibition mounted by the artist in 1999 in a vacant apartment in the Dauphins sur le Parc building across from Parc La Fontaine in Montréal.
Janet Biggs
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
October 4, 2012 – January 6, 2013
Janet Biggs is known mainly for her video, photography and performance works that revolve around an exploration of extremes, whether geographical or physical. In them, Biggs takes her subjects, and herself, to the very limits of what is possible. Four of the artist’s video pieces, produced between 2010 and 2012, will be screened at the MAC: Fade to White, 2010, Brightness All Around, 2011, and In the Cold Edge, 2010, which together form The Arctic Trilogy, and her latest video, A Step on the Sun, 2012.
Valérie Blass
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
February 2, 2012 – April 22, 2012
Valérie Blass is one of the most captivating artists to have emerged in Québec in the last ten years. She is a sculptor in every sense of the word: she is concerned with the object, with the way objects relate to one another and with their placement in space.
Ghada Amer
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
February 2, 2012 – April 22, 2012
Multidisciplinary artist Ghada Amer is known primarily for her pictorial work, which she augments with embroidery, temporarily blurring our reading of the works. Moving in closer to decipher the composition of her paintings, viewer turns into voyeur as the eye makes out, amidst the clumps and “drips” of thread, the female bodies displayed in situations of erotic pleasure.
Wangechi Mutu
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
February 2, 2012 – April 22, 2012
Wangechi Mutu’s work reflects her very original thinking on the state of the world and the relative hegemony of Western civilization. In her drawings and collages, as well as her sculptures, assemblages and videos, she conjures up the interplay of relationships between living organisms, humans and the power of nature. Highly regarded as a multidisciplinary artist, Mutu has exhibited regularly since the late 1990s.
Jon Pylypchuk
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
October 8, 2010 – January 2, 2011
Insidious. That’s the word to describe Canadian artist Jon Pylypchuk’s works and the way they insinuate themselves, with their benign appearance initially obscuring the seriousness of the subject matter. Our unease stems from the fact that he uses items we associate with childhood (figures, puppets, dolls) to tackle such complex topics as poverty and violence. From October 8, 2010 to January 2, 2011, the Musée d’art contemporain presents Jon Pylypchuk, a survey of the recent output, from 2006 to 2009, of this multidisciplinary artist who is equally at home in painting, sculpture, installation and video.
BGL/Pascal Grandmaison/Adad Hannah/Karen Tam exhibition
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
October 8, 2010 to January 2, 2011
In conjunction with the exhibition 2010 Sobey Art Award, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal is presenting works by the four Québec semifinalists – BGL, Pascal Grandmaison, Adad Hannah and Karen Tam – also nominated for this year’s award. The show features a selection of their recent works chosen by Lesley Johnstone, curator at the Musée and member of the Curatorial Panel for the 2010 Sobey Art Award.
Created in 2002 by the Sobey Art Foundation, the Sobey Art Award is the country’s pre-eminent award for contemporary Canadian art. It is given every year to an artist under forty who has exhibited in a public or commercial art gallery within the eighteen months prior to being nominated. Selected from around a hundred candidates nominated by a curatorial panel, the winner is awarded $50,000, and the other four finalists receive $5,000 each, for a total of $70,000 in prize money presented annually at a gala event.
Runa Islam
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
May 21 – September 6, 2010
Through her works, Islam pursues an investigation of the history of experimental film, doing away with narrative structures and representations in favour of visual explorations. The Montréal presentation focuses on the artist’s fascination with cinema as a device. It consists of five 16-mm film installations produced over the last six years, including a 2010 work commissioned by the two presenting museums.