Beaverbrook Art Gallery Exhibits
Beaverbrook Art Gallery Exhibits
- Mar 29 2025 - Dec 31 2025, All day
On top of an impressive permanent collection of over 7,000 works by New Brunswick, Canadian, and international artists, there are always many engaging exhibits on display, making for a unique visit every time.
River of Dreams: Impressionism on the St. Lawrence - March 29, 2025 - October 5, 2025
In the late 19th century, the Impressionist movement found a footing in Canada, and Quebec artists quickly responded with works of rare beauty and sophistication. River of Dreams: Impressionism on the St. Lawrence offers not just a magisterial statement on the outstanding quality of Quebec painting, but also a glimpse into the heart and soul of a culture, seen through the eyes of her most beloved and foundational artists.
Sources: Highlights from the Beaverbrook Collection - May 28, 2025- March 28, 2027
From Lord Beaverbrook’s initial gift of over 400 paintings and drawings the collection has grown to encompass more than 6000 objects, a collection that enhances rather than supplants that initial gift. The permanent collection’s core of International “masterworks,” paintings by Lucian Freud, JMW Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Stanley Spencer, John Constable, John Singer Sargent, and Salvador Dalí, among others, is unique in Canada, and has remained on view for most of the gallery’s 60-plus year history. With contemporary works sprinkled throughout our International wing to spark conversations, Sources: Highlights from the Beaverbrook Collection will introduce new audiences to the riches of the gallery’s beginning and serve as a reintroduction to those who believe themselves already familiar with the collection.
Canadian Folk Art – April 10, 2025 – January 31, 2026
This vibrant display celebrates the charm and creativity of Canadian folk art, featuring beloved works by Maud Lewis, Joe Norris, and other celebrated self-taught artists. With joyful paintings and whimsical sculptures, this collection captures the spirit of everyday life through bold colours, imaginative forms, and heartfelt storytelling.
Sarah Maloney’s Pleasure Ground: A Feminist Take on the Natural World – April 19, 2025 – October 19, 2025
Sarah Maloney, RCA (b. 1965) is a contemporary sculptor and textile artist who is nationally recognized for her representations of botanicals and the human body. Using media ranging from embroidery to bronze, Maloney challenges ideas of “women’s work,” craft, and artistic labour. She looks at Western history and culture through a feminist lens, and the results are depictions of plants, bones, and organs that reference gender, pleasure, desire, and power. Her craft is joyful, beautiful, and indicative of the structured nature of our biological, social and economic systems.
Meticulous, witty and historically researched, Maloney interprets mythology and symbolism in labour-intensive techniques from welding to stitching. Her work challenges how people think about icons of Western colonialism, such as museum collections, domestic gardens, and landscape art.
Eastern Edges: Atlantic Canadian Land and Seascapes - May 29, 2025 - September 28, 2025
The ocean is never far from the land in Atlantic Canada, and many of the landscape works in our permanent collection depict both land and sea. Whether by artists who were visiting Atlantic Canada, were born here, or had chosen one of our provinces as a place to live, whether permanently or just for a time, the works in Eastern Edges: Atlantic Canadian Land and Seascapes show the artistic response to the beauty of our natural setting over the decades. Out here, land and sea define our relationship to the world. Few can depict that relationship as these artists do, but anyone can share in the sense of wonder sparked on eastern edges.
Dalí Chapel – June 10, 2025 – June 14, 2026
To provide further context for Santiago El Grande and to honour this aspect of our artistic heritage, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery has installed this selection of religious-themed works in a newly reconsidered “Dalí Chapel.” Comprising European Renaissance and Baroque works alongside Canadian and International modernism and postmodernism, we hope this offers an opportunity to compare the evolution of sacred art over many centuries, while giving a fresh view of the humanity and complexity of these examples of the religious impulse.
Religious imagery, as interpreted by artists throughout the ages, has long served as a way for artists to express their faiths and their philosophies, to expand on tradition and to suggest novel new ways of thinking about the world. Whatever one’s personal faith, the Dalí Chapel should provide the opportunity for a visual, intellectual and imaginative journey through time.
Stephen Hutchings: Theatre of Trees - July 12, 2025 – October 22, 2025
Stephen Hutchings’ Theatre of Trees is an overwhelming visual poem, a spiritual self-portrait, and a summation of nearly a half-century of artmaking. Its scale, centered around a massive 40-foot-long canvas of a single fallen tree, is intended to evoke the vastness of feeling and time. The variety of surfaces—drawn and erased passages overlaid with coloured transparent varnishes of various densities—suggest the fleetingness of memory. The work expresses the gap between the finite duration of a human life and the unimaginable immensity of eternity. Hutchings’ tree depicts the external world as the embodiment of an inner landscape, the emotional terrain that constitutes a soul, imagined as a shimmering and ephemeral work of art.
Denise Richard: Trinket - July 12, 2025 – February 22, 2026
Denise Richard's thought-provoking works delve into the devastating consequences of fast fashion and mass production on ocean life. By transforming dollar store trinkets and discarded materials into sculptural objects, Richard exposes the dark underbelly of consumerism. Her use of everyday cheap materials serves as a reminder of the disposable culture that perpetuates the destruction of marine ecosystems. Richard’s art urges viewers to confront the true cost of their purchasing habits and consider the lasting impact on our planet's most vulnerable inhabitants.
John Fox: A Painter in Venice - July 19, 2025 – October 19, 2025
John Fox: A Painter in Venice showcases Montreal-based artist John Fox’s artworks created over decades from his beloved Venice — “the Paradise of Cities.” The exhibition shows the artist’s evolution from painting the heart of Venice to painting and drawing views of canals and squares in less familiar parts of the city. Fox’s oil paintings, watercolours, and pencil drawings record a half-century of exploration and observation of the places that fascinated him. He returned to Venice again and again, at least once each year from the mid-1970s until 2008. Venetian colour and light were inspirational sources for all of his painting — abstract and representational images alike — and his approach was explicitly enhanced by the Venetian masters who revolutionized the act of laying paint on the canvas. John Fox: A Painter in Venice demonstrates his devotion to the authenticity of Venice, and his very personal exploration of Venetian art and architecture.
Charles Bird King’s Indian Portraits: Part 2 - July 28, 2025 – November 26, 2025
The Charles Bird King Indian Portraits are a collection of hand-coloured lithographs of Indigenous leaders and delegates who visited Washington from 1822 to 1842. The portraits first appear in History of the Indian Tribes of North America, a three-volume set published by James Hall and Thomas McKenny. Thirty-five of the original Seventy-three King portraits from the Lord Beaverbrook Collection are exhibited in two parts from March to October 2025, examining Indigenous representation under the disassembling narrative of "vanishing" Indigenous peoples and cultures. This problematic and paternalistic framing has reinforced colonial ideologies of disappearance throughout history.
Indigenous leaders travelled to Washington to negotiate treaties and advocate for their rights to remain on their homelands. King's portraits provide insight into the individuals depicted and the broader stories of displacement, negotiation, resistance, and forced assimilation in 19th-century America.
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