Art Toronto 2020

Sonny Assu

Sonny Assu (Ligwilda’xw of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations) has been recognized for his mashups of Indigenous iconography and popular culture. Through a variety of mediums including sculpture, painting, prints, large-scale installations and interventions Assu’s work maintains a profound connection to past traditions while speaking to pertinent issues of our time.

Assu’s work is included in numerous major public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver), and the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2021, Assu received the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, awarded every two years by the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana – the home of one of the finest collections of Indigenous art in the world.

Gathie Falk

Gathie Falk’s practice meticulously transforms objects of everyday experience into extraordinary things. Working in a variety of media that includes performance art, sculpture, ceramics, painting and drawing, Falk has produced works that feel surreal and dreamlike, reinventing clothing, fruit, plants, shoes, or baseball caps into objects of much greater significance. Although these objects are relatable in their familiarity, it is the personal symbols they carry – not the universal – that are of interest to Falk. Her practice has been aligned with the traditions of Surrealism, Funk, Fluxus, and Pop Art, but the influences are rarely direct. Indeed, Falk is most comfortable when poised on the edge of contradictions.

Erin McSavaney

Renée Van Halm

Renée Van Halm has been a significant figure in Canadian art for over forty years, both as a practicing artist and as an arts educator. In the early part of her career, Van Halm was interested in creating forms that were hybrids of many media, not purely painting, sculpture, or architecture. The evolution of her subject and medium has led her to consider the many forms of visual presentation in our culture. Van Halm draws her images from a variety of sources: mainstream fashion, architecture and decor magazines, and more recently the work of 1920s Bauhaus artists and weavers, in considering the ways in which architectural space governs contemporary human experience.

Etienne Zack

Etienne Zack is one of today’s artists who are truly pushing the envelope in terms of painting concept; his process is entirely based on reading and taking notes – no visual source material is used. His process of making paintings relates to notions concerning the various ways history itself is manipulated and “worked out”. Zack’s work often focuses on the context in which artworks are produced and exhibited, and the physical and conceptual tools that go into creating them: the studio, art gallery, painter’s materials, and historical and theoretical reference works. Both poetic and playful, Zack’s painting prompts us to re-examine the everyday world around us.