Meet the Canadian artists heading to Venice Biennale

When the Venice Biennale opens to the public next Saturday, Canadians will be unusually well represented in the main show, a survey of global art entitled In Minor Keys. Of the 110 participants, five are from Canada.

Aside from the perennial Canada Pavilion, which this year features Montreal artist Abbas Akhavan, this country is typically lightly represented at the event sometimes called the Olympics of visual art.

The curators behind the huge group shows, commissioned to create an era-defining statement, have often seemed unaware of North American developments outside New York and Los Angeles. In particular, the 2024 edition missed an opportunity to include Indigenous artists from Canada who would have fit neatly with the themes of identity, outsiders and otherness.

Besides its Canadian contingent, this year’s Venice Biennale, however, is unusual for other reasons: It is the first curated by a Black woman – and the first to launch posthumously.

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Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh died suddenly in May last year after a cancer diagnosis, only six months after her appointment to the Biennale was announced. Fortunately, she had laid all the groundwork for her exhibition, defining the themes and selecting the artists, and had delivered the curatorial text to the administration a mere month before she died. With support from her family, the Biennale chose to continue as she had planned, with her team completing the work.

Although In Minor Keys includes many American and European artists, it is being positioned as a counterweight to the overdeveloped Western world. Kouoh drew heavily on Africa and its diasporas to consider themes of seeding, collaborating, rest and enchantment.

In keeping with these topics, the five participating Canadian artists all bring an element of spirituality to their considerations of culture and nature.

Manuel Mathieu

A Montrealer of Haitian ancestry, Manuel Mathieu creates paintings, prints and drawings that sit somewhere
between abstraction and figuration. In previous work he included references to Haiti’s troubled history –
founded by a slave rebellion at the beginning of the 19th-century, it was ruled by a dictatorship from the
1950s to the 1980s – but his recent art is more universalist in its visceral themes.

His spring Montreal show was entitled Perineum, a reference to that sometimes fragile piece of muscle and
skin that separates the body’s most intimate functions. In paintings and prints, hints of figures, faces,
eyes and lips emerge from dynamic swirls and scrawling lines.

Le plancher (The Floor) is part of the new Perineum series by Mathieu, a reference to the area
of skin and muscle at the bottom of the pelvis, separating the body’s most intimate functions.

The pair, participating in the Biennale as a duo, first worked together on a clay sculpture for a booth at
the Armory Show in New York in 2023; the female figure’s pendulous breasts served as a second set of arms.
(It was later included in a two-person show in Montreal in 2024 that toured to Calgary in 2025.)

Both artists draw on Asian mythology and decorative traditions to create fantastical art featuring dense
vegetation and transformed bodies, often about female power.

Perera, whose family came to Canada from Sri Lanka, is known for incorporating the South Asian miniature
tradition into her own narratives of mythology and science fiction, in meticulous paintings and elaborate
sculptures. The Torontonian’s recent work includes dancing figures whose swirling bodies are collages of
dense patterns borrowing from other imagery and mixed with erasures, and a painting of a naked woman,
covered in flies, who has a phallic floral arrangement in place of a head.

Santos, a Filipino-Canadian who lives in Calgary, has made reference to traditional dress, dance and
weaving in work that places her cultural heritage in an otherworldly realm. She also works as a tattoo
artist, and her recent paintings show surreal female figures whose entire bodies and faces are covered with
geometric patterning in saturated colours, as though their skins were psychedelic wallpaper.

Rajni Perera’s elaborately constructed sculptures, such as Gatekeeper of 2024, feature fantastical figures from her own mythological narratives.

The Third Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele, Belgium, January 1918 is a 2024 oil painting by
Ontario artist Bonnie Devine, one in a series of wartime landscapes in Europe and North America
accompanied by portraits of warriors who fought there, including her father.

Devine created a massive public art work for Nuit Blanche in Toronto in 2023, entitled Circle of
Enquiry for a Dish with One Spoon.

Mapping, the environment and Indigenous storytelling are repeating themes for Devine in works such as Writing Home, Letter to Sandy (2025).

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