Illustration by Dorothy Leung
Surely this is a coincidence. After several years spent rediscovering, reclaiming and celebrating female artists – Joyce Wieland, Kaija Sanelma Harris, Shelley Niro – the fall art season is all about the boys. In Toronto and Montreal in particular, big male careers – think Jeff Wall, Kent Monkman and David Altmejd – loom large.
Jeff Wall at Museum of Contemporary Art
Kathleen Bartels, former director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, has been working her West Coast contacts to good effect since she took over the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto in the midst of the pandemic. It’s been years, 35 to be precise, since Jeff Wall had a major show in Toronto and MOCA promises a full retrospective tracing the development of his large-scale lightbox photography over four decades.
In front of a nightclub, 2006 by Jeff Wall.Jeff Wall/Moca
All three exhibition floors at MOCA will be given over to the show, beginning on the ground floor with his icon-making images of young children shot against clouds and proceeding to the precisely staged, perfectly lit tableaux that made him famous. Those are the initially innocuous scenes of figures in a city street, a nightclub lineup or a suburban backyard where the artificiality itself adds a certain instability or sense of threat.
Wall, who divides his career between Vancouver and Los Angeles, has revolutionized his medium since the 1980s and remains the key artist in a Vancouver school of conceptual photography, but his work tends to be known only in snippets in Central Canada. The artist will turn 80 next year; this late-career retrospective promises to be the highlight of fall 2025.
Jeff Wall Photographs 1984–2023 runs from Oct. 19 to March 22.
David Blackwood at Art Gallery of Ontario
Meanwhile, across town, the Art Gallery of Ontario turns to a sentimental favourite: David Blackwood’s prints of Newfoundland feature its history and its myths from the time of his childhood and before. Until his death in 2022, Blackwood lived in Port Hope, Ont., where he kept the studio that produced his haunting views of mummers, whalers and shipwrecks, but he returned home to the source of his inspiration every summer. The AGO, which holds his archives and the largest collection of his work, promises a comprehensive exhibition charting his artistic development.
David Blackwood: Myth & Legend runs from Oct. 8 to July 26.
Kent Monkman at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Like Wall, Kent Monkman relies on the elaborate staging of his subjects, in his case to create revisionist history paintings working from photographs of tableaux using live models in costumes. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is offering a 40-painting retrospective of the Cree artist’s sometimes satirical art, and the exhibition will include the two massive paintings that Monkman created for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2019.
Sunday in the Park, 2010, by Kent Monkman.Kent Monkman/Supplied
Taking his inspiration from the Met’s own collection of history painting, Monkman erected mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) in the Met’s vast entrance hall, featuring two huge panels depicting the arrival of Europeans at Turtle Island on one side of the front doors and the resurgence of Indigenous peoples on the other. As it takes aim at North American history (and contemporary issues such as climate change), Monkman’s art can swing wildly from pathos to bathos, from grand, multilayered political deconstructions to one-liners, but the Met paintings, so closely tied to colonial paintings in that museum’s collection, represented a vindication of his approach. This loan marks the first time they will be shown in Canada.
History is Painted by the Victors is now open and runs to March 8.
David Altmejd at Galerie de l’UQAM
Hare, 2022, expanding foam, epoxy, acrylic paint, quartz, coloured pencil, pencil, steel and wood, by David Altmejd.Galerie UQUAM
Montreal will also celebrate the return of David Altmejd this season as L’Université du Québec à Montréal welcomes home one of its most illustrious alumni. The artist, who now lives and works in Los Angeles, will be collaborating with curator Louise Déry at the UQAM gallery to unveil a series of about two dozen sculptural busts, some of which will be made on site. These will feature both real and mythological figures, human, animal and monstrous – Altmejd has always been interested in the werewolf – in the surreal layering for which the artist is known.
David Altmejd: Agora runs from Nov. 7 to Jan. 17.
Manuel Mathieu, PHI Foundation
The paintings of Manuel Mathieu sit somewhere between abstraction and figuration, history and contemporaneity, as the Montreal artist initially took his inspiration from the glories and the violence of his native Haiti, looking for healing and resilience in the midst of trauma. In a major new show at the PHI Foundation in Old Montreal, he broadens his scope considerably, adding more media and looking to all humanity. The show includes a sculptural installation made collaboratively with PHI staff and a new video work featuring a darkened scene in which a series of matches are lit, each new one striking off its flickering predecessor. You could read a metaphor into that.
Manuel Mathieu: Unity in Darkness runs from Oct. 23 to March 8.
Can’t-miss exhibitions by female artists
Of course, five guys don’t necessarily represent a revisionist trend. There are several important exhibitions featuring female artists this season, including the Jana Sterbak retrospective continuing to Dec. 21 at Calgary’s Esker Foundation. Chameleon-like Lee Miller, the early 20th-century American artist known as a fashion photographer, a Second World War photojournalist and companion to the surrealist Man Ray, is the subject of an exhibition at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver from Nov. 7 to Feb. 1.
Meanwhile, this is the last week to see a recent multimedia work by the American video artist Joan Jonas in Cape Breton, N.S., at the Eltuek Arts Centre in Sydney, N.S., and the Inverness County Centre for the Arts. A collaboration with marine biologist David Gruber, Moving Off the Land II celebrates the ocean, noting its diversity and its fragility. It was filmed partly in Cape Breton, (where Jonas spends her summers) partly in Jamaica and at aquariums in Europe, the U.S. and Japan. It includes underwater footage, as well as numerous drawings, an aquarium of glass sea creatures and a monumental collage of a whale, accompanied by a recording of the mammal’s calls. The work was acquired jointly last year by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the National Gallery of Canada, and a national tour is forthcoming.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Kent Monkman's first name.