Beaverbrook Art Gallery Exhibits

  • Mar 29 – Dec 31 2026, 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.

 

Jake Kimble: My Bones Are Funny, Sometimes They Ache. - May 30, 2026 – October 11, 2026

My Bones Are Funny, Sometimes They Ache presents the breakout artist’s recent works, including video, paper towel prints, self-portraits, and beadwork. Through self-portraiture, Kimble engages the body as a site of honesty and repair, where vulnerability becomes a form of resistance. His photographs and videos extend beyond personal narrative to reflect broader Indigenous experiences of loss, care, and renewal. In tracing these connections, Kimble’s work reveals that to laugh, to ache, and to remember are not separate gestures but part of the same ongoing act of survival.

 

Photo East - May 30, 2026 - September 6, 2026 

Document/ary: New Photographs from Atlantic Canada presents the work of 14 contemporary lens-based artists from and/or based in Atlantic Canada. In the introductory text to a 1978 MoMA exhibition entitled Mirrors and Windows, John Szarkowski made the claim that all photographs exist on a spectrum—providing either a window to the world or a mirror to the soul. He writes: “The intention of this analysis [is] not to divide photography into two parts. On the contrary, it [is] to suggest a continuum, a single axis with two poles.” 

Building upon this tradition, Document/ary suggests that photographs exist on an axis between documentary and document. Presented between two exhibition spaces, the portion in the McCain Gallery presents seven artists who use the camera as a means of documenting art performance and process. The Lower Gallery presents seven additional artists who use the camera to capture the realities of themselves and others out in the world. 

 

Still Life: So Much Depends – March 21, 2026 – August 9, 2026 

For painters, the still life serves a practical purpose. A collection of objects didn’t complain when painted for hours or days and expressed no opinions about the painter’s skill or approach. Practice makes perfect, and mute objects were always available for practice. Still lifes are also dependable for experimentation. The distortions and wild colour of much early modernism did not appear so shocking when practiced on inanimate objects rather than on one’s friends, loved ones, or clients. It is no accident that the most common subject in Cubist painting, for example, was the still life. As the fourteen artists in this show attest, so much depends on artists capturing the simple objects of the world, and in so doing enlivening, enriching, and nurturing the internal worlds that sustain our imaginations. 


At Abstraction’s Edges: Selected Works from the Collection - March 14, 2026 – May 27, 2026

The artists whose works are included in At Abstraction’s Edges embrace different approaches to abstraction, some whole-heartedly reject imagery, others distort and adapt images from the world, still others create new objects that have no counterpart. All of them are using art to think about the world in new ways, and to challenge us to follow along on their journey.


Art School Confidential: Atlantic Canadian Artists in Canadian Art Schools - December 6, 2025 – May 24, 2026

Whether at a stand-alone art college, or as a department in a larger university, every art school has something different to offer the aspiring artist, whether that be facilities, the surrounding city, the specific gifts of the faculty or the relative scale of the experience: intimate and thoughtful perhaps, or large and bustling. Art School Confidential features work by faculty members and graduates of NSCAD, the NBCCD, and the Université de Moncton are featured along with artists who chose to study outside of the region in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.    


Eleven Painters Start a War - February 28, 2026 – June 7, 2026

A Toronto-centric art movement of men and women that was formed in the late autumn of 1953 to protest the stifling tastes and preferences of the artistic societies grew over the decade into a concerted effort to overturn the artistic status quo by a group of artists, who banded together and called themselves “Painters Eleven.” Painters Eleven asked – demanded – that their viewers see things differently, their paintings in particular, the world and people around them, in the new light that abstraction cast upon them. Their aim was to wage an artistic assault – what was termed at the time as a “war” – on complacency, outmoded ideas and intolerance.


Perusing the New: A Modern Design History of New Brunswick - October 24, 2025 – April 12, 2026

New Brunswick has a rich and notable visual history, and recently there has been much explored relative to its postwar visual culture. Yet a significant and pervasive area of that culture has been largely unexamined to any degree: graphic design. From the modernist 1960s corporate identities of NBTel and NB Power, to the Saint John Harbour Bridge symbol, the extraordinary legacy of Theatre New Brunswick’s 1970s posters, and the groundswell of energetic work created to embody the modern Acadian Renaissance, the province’s graphic design narrative is an active and integral part of our cultural identity that has been overlooked – until now.  


A Family Journey: The Private Collections of the Sobey Family - October 18, 2025 – September 27, 2026

A Family Journey: The Private Collections of the Sobey Family presents an historical overview of Canadian art from the perspective of collectors who built significant legacies in Atlantic Canada. Drawn from the Donald and Beth Sobey art collection and with works loaned by Empire Company Limited, the Sobey Art Foundation, and other Sobey family members, the exhibition tells the story of Canadian art through the lens of one family’s multi-generational collecting and philanthropic legacy.


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.


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.  


For more information, click here.