5 art shows to see in Montréal before the holidays

Late fall in Montréal is a prime time for art gallery hopping, letting us bask in artistic genius as warm days and daylight wane. In addition to several Must-see Autumn 2015 museum exhibitions, the following five exhibitions on display in November and December offer a glimpse of the depth and quality of art in Montréal’s galleries year round.

Begin your art tour with a solo show by Paris-based designer and Montrealer Rad Hourani at Arsenal, located in the Griffintown/Little Burgundy/Saint-Henri area of the city around the corner from several renowned restaurants, bars and stores on Notre Dame Street. In his solo exhibition Neutralité/Neutrality, Hourani uses painting, print, sculpture and video to expand on ideas in his unisex fashion line, challenging divisions of sex, gender, race, nationality and other social segregators. While we can’t touch the art despite its welcoming tactile nature, an on-site pop-up shop entices us to wear Hourani’s gorgeous fall fashions. While there, visit Galerie Division in the same massive industrial building just blocks from the Lachine Canal.

On the western edge of Old Montréal, the factory-turned-gallery Darling Foundry greets visitors with Mirador, a public art mountain of scaffolding and other materials created by collective Acapulco, while in the main room inside, Hôtel Formes Sauvages, a towering video triptych by French performance artist André Fortino keeps us watching and wondering what he’ll do next. Created over the past five years, the videos follow Fortino as he roams from abandoned urban buildings to the seaside in a daringly physical exploration of dance and gesture fraught with visceral emotion, sometimes disturbing imagery, and a collision of reality and illusive memory.

Witness the breadth of work being done by Brazil’s contemporary artists in DHC/ART’s Imagine Brazil exhibition, spanning six floors of the gallery’s two beautiful Old Montréal spaces. The complexity of personal and national Brazilian identity is seen in the variety of work here, including Jonathas de Andrade’s critical “instructional” paintings on how to caramelize bananas, Rivane Neuenschwander’s journey of a bubble in The Tenant, Rodrigo Cass’s palpable video projections, Adriana Varejão’s anatomical painting-sculpture Folds, Cinthia Marcelle’s sound and images of a busy street in Autómovel, a curated collection of artist books, and much more.

Step into a honey-scented liminal world at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art downtown where artist Anna Boghiguian’s Cities by the Rivers confronts geographical and socio-political barriers – from waterways to refugee status – through mesmerizing and genuinely affecting sculpture, drawing, painting, the written word and a honeycomb installation that trace Boghiguian’s time in Egypt, India, Ethiopia, Brazil and Montréal. While at the Belgo Building, see even more great art at commercial galleries and artist-run centres, including SKOL, Galerie Dominique Bouffard, Les Territoires, Visual Voice, and several others.

Galerie UQAM at the Université du Québec à Montréal on Sainte-Catherine Street provides a fascinating look into the life work of an influential Canadian artist and several of his contemporaries-cum-collaborators in Hank Bull. Connexion. The sprawling yet intimately focused exhibition moves from the 1970s to present day, filling the gallery space with the materials of Hank Bull’s explorations of social communication as art and the many ways people connect to each other in communities. Film, video and photography capture his improvised public performances, alongside sculpture, painting and print, music, multimedia and installation work, and boxes of files and discs and other objects imbued with meaning or simply information.