Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts

The Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts celebrate the career achievements of Canada’s finest artists. Each year, seven artists are acknowledged for excellence in the visual and media arts, including one who receives the Saidye Bronfman Award for fine crafts. An individual or group is also recognized for outstanding contributions to the visual and/or media arts in a voluntary or professional capacity. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Canada Council for the Arts and the Governor General of Canada.

Picturesque Landscapes in North American Illustrated Publications, 1800–1900

This exhibition explores the omnipresence of the “picturesque” in print culture in the 19th century. In these books and magazines, an increasingly flexible definition of the term resulted in imagery that ranged from stereotypical landscapes to such seemingly unlikely “picturesque” subjects as urban views and even heavy industry.

Open during Reading Room hours.

Image: J. Douglas Woodward, View from Steeple of Arlington-Street Church [Boston], in William Cullen Bryant, ed., Picturesque America, or, The Land We Live In, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1872). National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, Ottawa

Angela Grauerholz: The inexhaustible image ... épuiser l'image

This exhibition will highlight Grauerholz’s photographic career over the past twenty years. Developed around her major photographic and installation works, the exhibition explores how her artwork is inspired both pictorially and conceptually. Issues intrinsic to the photographic medium such as time and memory are considered along with notions related to the archive, representation, and imagination. 

Organized by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography.

Presented by Pratt & Whitney Canada

Image: Angela Grauerholz, Jewish Cemetery, 2004. Courtesy of the artist and Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto

Central European Drawings from the National Gallery of Canada

From Dürer to Dix, this exhibition highlights the strong assemblage of German and Central European drawings in our permanent collection, many of which have only been recently acquired. Organized chronologically and thematically, the exhibition surveys the period from the early 16th to the early 20th century by showcasing the National Gallery of Canada’s rich collection of Classical and Romantic landscape drawings, as well as portraits, figure studies and compositional sketches from all periods. 

Image: Peter Krafft, Archduke Johann as Chamois Hunter, 1815, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo © NGC

Pop Life: Art in a Material World

Pop Life: Art in a Material World explores the complex relationship between contemporary art, commerce, marketing and the mass media that has evolved since the late 1980s when Andy Warhol uttered his provocative maxim that “good business is the best art.” Featuring artists often known as much for their notoriety as for their art, the exhibition traces how Warhol, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Keith Haring, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Martin Kippenberger and numerous other high-profile figures from the international art world from the 1980s to today have developed iconic, at times even famous, signature “brands” using their artistic persona as much as their art.

Organized by Tate Modern, London, in association with the National Gallery of Canada

Visit the exhibition website
Twitter: #popngc

Image: Jeff Koons. Rabbit, 1986 © Jeff Koons

Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie

Moshe Safdie’s architecture is profoundly social.  His aesthetic language of transcendent light, powerful geometry, and iconic forms serves Safdie’s belief in the traditional purpose of architecture: "the exploration of human activity and perception." Ceremonial, uplifting, yet never intimidating, Safdie’s buildings are places where communities are forged of strangers, memory is enshrined, and identity is created in built form. Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie explores this renowned architect’s buildings and the philosophy that shapes them.

Organized by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Catalogue available.

Carl Beam

Starting in the 1970s, Carl Beam (1943–2005) was at the vanguard of a new and assertive art discourse that challenged the prevailing marginalization of contemporary Aboriginal art. Consisting of more than 50 of Beam’s most remarkable works which have been selected from his early career in the 1970s to the end of his production in the early 2000s, this retrospective illuminates the artist’s investigations into the metaphysical aspects of Western and Indigenous culture, while powerfully illustrating the wide-ranging physicality of his work, evident in everything from his large-scale paintings, to his ceramics, constructions, and videotapes.

Organized by the National Gallery of Canada
Catalogue available

Image: Carl Beam. The North American Iceberg, 1985. NGC, Ottawa. Photo © NGC

It is what it is. Recent Acquisitions of New Canadian Art

It Is What It Is highlights both the National Gallery of Canada’s and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography’s commitment to collecting contemporary Canadian art. Our goal is to seek out the best and most innovative works being made today by engaging with the diverse practices of living artists working from coast to coast. These artists create in a variety – and often combination of – media, from video to drawing and painting, photography to sculpture and installation. This exhibition showcases a selection of our most recent acquisitions and reveals the unique ways contemporary Canadian artists are tackling the larger social and political state of the world through their art and how they choose interdisciplinary modes of self-expression that transcend and explode traditional categories, materials and genres. The curators of these collections engage with this artistic production without the benefit of historical hindsight and therefore must be risk takers, knowing all the while that the judgments made today will themselves be judged over time, again and again. This exhibition takes the pulse of contemporary art production in Canada as it becomes part of our national art history.

Image: Valerie Blass, The Straw Man, 2008 NGC, Ottawa. Photo © NGC

Caravaggio and his Circle in Rome

The National Gallery of Canada and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, are organizing a major exhibition for the summer of 2011 on the theme of Caravaggio and his Roman followers. Not since Michelangelo or Raphael had one artist in Europe affected so many of his contemporaries over such a broad geography and irrevocably changed the course of painting in a major center. This ambitious exhibition intends to explore the profound impact of Caravaggio’s work on a wide range of painters of Italian, French, Dutch, Flemish and Spanish origin who resided in Rome either during his lifetime or immediately afterwards. Approximately sixty paintings by some of the most important artists of the Baroque period will be included in this show.

Image: Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Italian (1571–1610), The Cardsharps, c. 1594 Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, AP 1987.06