[ad_1]
Toronto art institutions are presenting a bumper crop of exhibitions this fall. Gallery hoppers may notice that many shows share a deeply immersive quality. Get ready to go all in and be swept away by the power of art at the following must-see exhibitions.
Visitors to the Aga Khan Museum will enter British artist Shezad Dawood’s universe through an enthralling virtual reality experience followed by a stroll around a garden comprised of digital plants that grow in response to music by the exhibition’s inspiration, the late American jazz innovator Yusef Lateef.
Opening Nov. 10, Night in the Garden of Love – titled after Lateef’s 1988 novella – also features a selection of his drawings, together with five new, interconnected works by Dawood. Curator Marianne Fenton says the show “will surprise audiences by immersing them in a very different exhibition experience. Audiences will ‘see’ sound, smell new scents and explore virtual worlds in a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural and cross-temporal experience. Through these alternative ways of looking and thinking, Dawood invites us to reframe how we think about climate change.”
Visitors to the Koffler Centre for the Arts will delve into the harrowing story of the German massacre of 33,000 Jewish Ukrainians in Babyn Yar, near Kyiv – and then will marvel at the enchanting synagogue built in 2021 in order to bring hope to a place full of grief. Running until Nov. 12, the ambitious show, The Synagogue at Babyn Yar: Turning the Nightmare of Evil into a Shared Dream of Good, was installed by Canadian architect Douglas Birkenshaw with architectural photography by Iwan Baan and large-scale photographic murals by Canadian photographer and artist Edward Burtynsky in collaboration with Ukrainian photographer and visual artist Maxim Dondyuk. “Profound historic tragedy and poetic artistic beauty may exist side by side in our world,” says curator and architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt. “The memory of the tragedy can provide depth to the experience of beauty, while the latter may, to some extent, illuminate the abyss of our loss.”
At the Gardiner Museum, one of the most celebrated living ceramicists, Magdalene Odundo, makes her Canadian debut. Titled Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects, the towering show pitches the Kenyan-British artist’s sculptures alongside a panoply of contextual artworks and artifacts from across time and culture. Odundo’s vessels are renowned for their spiritual, almost sentient, essence (and for smashing auction sale price records). “The beauty of Odundo’s work invites us to slow down and reflect on the deeper aspects of what it means to be human,” says Sequoia Miller, the Gardiner Museum’s chief curator and deputy director. “Walking into the exhibition, visitors will experience a kind of reverence, but also, a sense of hope, as Odundo demonstrates ways of responding to a wide range of cultures in ways that are generative rather than extractive.” The exhibition runs until April 21, 2024.
Also making a Canadian museum debut is Brian Donnelly, a.k.a. Brooklyn-based polymath KAWS. At the Art Gallery of Ontario, until March 24, KAWS: Family presents the artist and designer’s larger-than-life sculptures, augmented reality installations, exuberant paintings and infamous product and fashion designs as a series of encounters.
Curator Julian Cox says, “Like Warhol and Haring before him, KAWS welcomes the viewer with forms that are immediately identifiable – and having caught our attention, confounds with his nuance, pathos and technical skill, encouraging us to consider what is companionship, what is family, what is our relationship to objects.” KAWS’s creative force should leave a lasting impression – but visitors who think it’s following them around are not mistaken: interventions by KAWS throughout the museum will surprise and delight.
Also at the AGO, opening Oct. 21, Building Icons: Arnold Newman’s Magazine World, 1938–2000, features more than 200 of the American portrait photographer’s works. Newman photographed some of the world’s most eminent people – Pablo Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Igor Stravinsky, Salvador Dalí, Marilyn Monroe, Glenn Gould, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, to name just a few – most often in their own environment. As Newman once said, “I prefer to photograph people at ease because I come closer to what I’ve called the ‘common denominator’ of that personality.” Amid so many heavyweights in one room, viewers are bound to feel even just a little awestruck.
Finally, for those who want everything, everywhere, all at once, this year’s Art Toronto, which takes over the Toronto Metro Convention Centre, Oct. 26-29, features artworks from more that 110 galleries from around world. “When collectors see the Focus Exhibition, curated by legendary curator Kitty Scott, they will be mesmerized by the museum-quality works that surround them,” says Art Toronto’s director Mia Nielsen. Nielsen hopes individual works “inspire an emotional response. So much of falling in love with art is trusting your visceral reaction to the work.”
Advertising feature produced by Globe Content Studio. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.
[ad_2]
Source link