{"id":29165,"date":"2026-05-02T13:54:42","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T13:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/29165\/"},"modified":"2026-05-02T13:54:42","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T13:54:42","slug":"meet-the-canadian-artists-heading-to-venice-biennale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/29165\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Canadian artists heading to Venice Biennale"},"content":{"rendered":"

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Besides its Canadian contingent, this year\u2019s Venice Biennale, however, is unusual for other reasons: It is the first curated by a Black woman \u2013 and the first to launch posthumously.<\/p>\n

Venice Biennale jury resigns in politically charged controversy at art exhibition<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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

\n Manuel Mathieu <\/p>\n

A Montrealer of Haitian ancestry, Manuel Mathieu creates paintings, prints and drawings that sit somewhere
\n between abstraction and figuration. In previous work he included references to Haiti\u2019s troubled history \u2013
\n founded by a slave rebellion at the beginning of the 19th-century, it was ruled by a dictatorship from the
\n 1950s to the 1980s \u2013 but his recent art is more universalist in its visceral themes. <\/p>\n

His spring Montreal show was entitled Perineum, a reference to that sometimes fragile piece of muscle and
\n skin that separates the body\u2019s most intimate functions. In paintings and prints, hints of figures, faces,
\n eyes and lips emerge from dynamic swirls and scrawling lines.<\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n This 2025 mixed media painting by Mathieu is titled Autoportrait or Self Portrait.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n In Mathieu’s Abundance of 2026, hints of figuration emerge from swirls of paint.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n (Photographs Guy Lheureux\/Jeanne Tetreault\/Supplied)<\/p>\n

\n Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos<\/p>\n

The pair, participating in the Biennale as a duo, first worked together on a clay sculpture for a booth at
\n the Armory Show in New York in 2023; the female figure\u2019s pendulous breasts served as a second set of arms.
\n (It was later included in a two-person show in Montreal in 2024 that toured to Calgary<\/a> in 2025.) <\/p>\n

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

Perera<\/a>, whose family came to Canada from Sri Lanka, is known for incorporating the South Asian miniature
\n tradition into her own narratives of mythology and science fiction, in meticulous paintings and elaborate
\n sculptures. The Torontonian\u2019s recent work includes dancing figures whose swirling bodies are collages of
\n dense patterns borrowing from other imagery and mixed with erasures, and a painting of a naked woman,
\n covered in flies, who has a phallic floral arrangement in place of a head. <\/p>\n

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

\"\"\/<\/p>\n

Rajni Perera’s elaborately constructed sculptures, such as Gatekeeper of 2024, feature fantastical figures from her own mythological narratives. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n Primitive (2025), a painting by Perera, uses
\nacrylic gouache studded with beads of glass, semiprecious stone and mother of pearl. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n Waiting For Sanni Yaka, a 2022 mixed media work by Perera features dancing figures marked with erasures. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n Shroud of siblinghood (red-vented cockatoo) is a 2025 painting by Marigold Santos made by applying gesso, acrylic and pigment to the canvas.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n In works such as shroud hand (orchid mantis) of 2025, Santos positions her iconography in an otherworldly realm. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n In Santos’ shroud (floral tethers illuminating) of 2025, woman’s skin is patterned like psychedelic wallpaper.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n (Photographs by Simran Malik\/Ivan Erofeev\/Rajiv Menon Contemporary\/Jeffrey Deitch Gallery\/Supplied)
\n \"\"\/
\n (Photographs by Jared Sych\/Darren Rigo\/Supplied)<\/p>\n

\n Bonnie Devine<\/p>\n

The most senior of the Canadian participants, Bonnie Devine is an Ojibwe artist from the Serpent River
\n First Nation in Ontario who once made a full-size canoe out of her thesis notes on uranium mining in her
\n home territory at the top of Georgian Bay. <\/p>\n

Now retired from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, where she served as the founding chair
\n of its Indigenous visual culture program, Devine continues to work in Toronto, where her drawings, paintings
\n and installations layer Indigenous storytelling and visual traditions overtop colonial practices. Mapping
\n and the environment are recurring themes.<\/p>\n

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

\"\"\/
\n Devine created a massive public art work for Nuit Blanche in Toronto in 2023, entitled Circle of
\n Enquiry for a Dish with One Spoon.
\n <\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n Mapping, the environment and Indigenous storytelling are repeating themes for Devine in works such as Writing Home, Letter to Sandy (2025).
\n <\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n (Photographs by Erinn Brush\/Bonnie Devine\/Supplied)<\/p>\n

\n Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka<\/p>\n

\n A Japanese-Canadian who lives with bipolar disorder, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka has built her career on fertile
\n experimentation with traditional Japanese paper arts; she makes sculptures, large print installations and
\n wearable pieces. She is inspired both by ukiyo-e, those \u201cpictures of the floating world\u201d that portrayed
\n daily life during the Edo period, and by gyotaku, fish prints that fishermen once used to record their
\n catch. <\/p>\n

She has also worked extensively in Kinngait, Nunavut, where Japanese printmaking was introduced in the
\n 1950s. Since 2021, she has collaborated with Inuit artist Ashoona Ashoona on images of ice and snow, plus
\n maps that link the region to Japan and memorialize family members. Her more recent work considers the
\n environment and mental health. <\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n To create Spiral (automatic thoughts) in 2025, Hatanaka used both linocut techniques and
\n gyotaku, a form of direct printing from objects originally used to record fishing catches.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n Hatanaka printed a linocut on paper handmade by Tatsuyuki Kataoka to make Rumination in 2025.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n Jazz times, a 2022 work, uses a patchwork of washi paper as well as rice bags and natural dyes.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"\/
\n (Photographs by Maru Arai\/Ibrahim Abusitta\/Alexa Kumiko
\n Hatanaka\/Supplied)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the Venice Biennale opens to the public next Saturday, Canadians will be unusually well represented in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29166,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[136,17,617],"class_list":{"0":"post-29165","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-canada","8":"tag-appwebview","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nopolly"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}