The 2025 edition of Art Toronto launched Thursday, Oct. 24, and the annual event brings more than 100 galleries from around the country and beyond to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. There’s no bigger art fair in this country, and for visiting artists like Karen Tam from Montreal, the hot topic of the weekend is always the same. Everyone wants to know: Oh, did you see this work?
Experiencing everything on offer can feel impossible, especially over the course of a single cocktail party, and though Tam strives to be a completist, there’s often something left to discover. “I probably missed some things,” says Tam Friday morning. The night before, she was attending the Art Toronto kick-off — where she came away with some powerful first impressions. The same can be said for other visitors to the fair. Here are a few of the highlights we heard about from artists in attendance.
Nadia Myre at Macaulay + Co. and Blouin Division Gallery
Tam was left awe-struck by two booths representing Nadia Myre, a Sobey-winning artist who recently closed a survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Macaulay + Co. and Blouin Division Gallery are both showing recent work by the artist: large-scale pieces composed with ceramic bugle beads. They range in texture from earthy and matte to tantalizingly glossy, and Myre combines them to create an arresting gradient of soft twilight colour. At Blouin Division, the gallery has presented the Algonquin artist’s work alongside smaller (though life-sized) beaded sculptures by fellow Sobey winner, Nico Williams.
“They feel so tactile. You just want to touch them, but you know that you can’t,” says Tam of Myre’s compositions. Fellow artist Tyler Hilton goes a step further: “You wanna bite them.”
Jim Verburg at Zalucky Contemporary
Hilton is a Toronto-based artist who’s showing prints at Art Toronto through Smokestack Studio and Gallery. “At a fair, I’m always a little addled, really social,” he says, “and I guess, mostly, I’m engaging with formal things.” For him, a surprising use of colour — or texture, or scale — might cut through the noise. In this case, it’s Jim Verburg’s “alchemical” use of material.
New works by Verburg (found at the Zalucky Contemporary booth) are made with tarlatan, a cheesecloth-like fabric which Hilton happens to use all the time as a printmaker. “I know a lot about tarlatan,” laughs Hilton, but he’s never seen it like this.
“Looking at [Verburg’s] work, to me, felt like looking at a magic trick where the magician is explaining exactly how the illusion was created. But it still maintains this awe-inspiring, ‘How, though?!’ It’s elegant. Restrained but still warm. Yeah, that’s exciting for me.
“I think a lot of time I’m looking for things that I don’t have as an artist. I’m not a restrained person, so I admire that [quality] in others.”
Jeremy Shaw at Bradley Ertaskiran
Hilton was also drawn to a selection of screenprints by Jeremy Shaw — works from the artist’s Cathartic Illustration series. “They’re altered state images, which could kind of be mistaken for a 1960s blow-your-mind Janis Joplin background,” says Hilton, “but they transcend cliche and that is no easy achievement.”
Luther Konadu at 272 Gallery
At the 272 Gallery stall, artist Roda Medhat was intrigued by the work of Winnipeg-based artist Luther Konadu: photographic portraits, often shot through a mirror. Medhat, who is presenting two installations on the main floor of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, has worked in photography himself, and he’s struck by Konadu’s inventive take on the medium.
“[Konadu] uses the frame as an extension of the photograph,” for example, “and sometimes there are these colour blocks within the frames. It’s an interesting approach.”
Says Medhat: “The way they capture themselves and their peers around them is done in a really interesting way that I haven’t seen.”
Sandra Brewster, Make Trouble
Like the work Medhat is showing at the fair, this 2024 installation by Toronto artist Sandra Brewster is appearing on the main floor of the convention centre — which is free for the public to access, FYI!
Brewster, who’s nominated for the 2025 Sobey Art Award, was commissioned to create the piece for the Toronto Biennial of Art, and she used her own childhood photos in its creation.
On the panels, little girls in pigtails are seen playing outside. In scale, the installation towers over the viewer, but Tam was drawn to its sense of intimacy.
The piece is one of her favourite works at Art Toronto, and though Brewster’s work centres the Black Canadian experience, both artists draw on family history in their practice. (Tam is presenting an installation at Art Toronto inspired by stories of Chinese immigration to Canada from Hong Kong.)
“Memory, representation, identity — and then seeing how [Brewster’s] work, in a way, centres around Black presence and being in Canada — as an artist, that informs my work as well.”
James Lee Chiahan at Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain
Tam was also charmed by a selection of small paintings by fellow Montreal artist James Lee Chiahan. Rendered in oil on yupo paper, the scenes feel like snapshots to Tam. “He is painting, in a way, everyday life,” she says. “They have the feeling of studies — sort of like fleeting moments.”
Stephanie Temma Hier at Bradley Ertaskiran
Vancouver-based artist Russna Kaur is a long-time fan of Stephanie Temma Hier. “The way that she frames paintings with ceramics has always been fascinating to me, and I love how whimsical they are,” says Kaur, whose own work — a site-specific installation at the top of the convention centre escalators — greets visitors arriving at the fair.
At the Bradley Ertaskiran booth, Kaur fell in love with a piece from 2023: Clean Gloves Hide Dirty Hands. The composition is wreathed in realistically floppy stoneware dish gloves. “When you’re looking at the painting, I feel like it’s almost like you’re reading a book without any words,” says Kaur. “Every time you look at it, the story can change, and I find that really exciting, especially when it comes to painting.”
Melanie Authier at Olga Korper Gallery
Kaur got to know painter Melanie Authier during a recent artist residency, and she’s become a great admirer of her work. “I’m naturally fascinated with her process, and how the paintings unfold with all of these really tiny lines and layers of transparent paint,” says Kaur. Her own approach is very different, she explains. And at Art Toronto, she was awed by an Authier painting at the Olga Korper Gallery booth: Asleep Inside Her Bones. “Her work, it has so much movement — this sense of fluidity.”
Elisabeth Perrault at Pangée
Toronto-based artist Aline Setton knew she’d find something enchanting at Pangée’s booth, and Elisabeth Perrault’s contributions were among her favourite discoveries at the fair. “I thought it was very delicate and powerful at the same time,” says Setton. “It reminded me of Louise Bourgeois’s work” — though instead of spiders, Perrault prefers unicorns. On a plinth, a small ceramic beast twists and contorts on its sinewy limbs, as if attempting to break free from its cute corporeal cage. Behind it is a more recent textile work: Peau de licorne (2025). Stitched together from various fabrics, it hangs from the wall like a shimmering coil of shed skin.
Azza El Siddique at Bradley Ertaskiran
Setton is presenting a solo exhibition at the Duran Contemporain booth, and after performing at the fair Thursday night, she set out on the floor, seeking work by artists she follows. Among them: Azza El Siddique. “I think she has a way of mixing media that has a real finesse,” says Setton. “It’s a very smart play between materialities.” This 2025 work (From the River’s Mouth) combines raw ceramic and steel, and it’s on display at the (very popular) Bradley Ertaskiran booth. As Setton notes, the unfired vessel is bound to change over time. “Raw ceramics have a lifespan that is dependent on the weather and humidity,” she says. “And she’s using it against metal, which is a very sturdy material. It has this mix of fragility and stability that I think is very interesting.”
Jen Aitken at TrépanierBaer Gallery
Hilton takes a similar approach to navigating the fair. While he’s at Art Toronto, he likes to seek out work by folks he’s long admired, and at the TrépanierBaer Gallery booth, he was excited see Jen Aitken is moving in a new direction. The Toronto-based artist often uses common construction materials in her sculptures. Think fibreglass, framing lumber, steel hardware. That’s still the case, says Hilton, but he found the sculptures at Art Toronto to be a “softening of form.”
“It’s like when you see a kid who’s gone through puberty since the last time you saw him, you’re like, Wow, I can recognize you, but you look different,” he laughs. “The drawings that went with the sculptures were fascinating. It was impossible to tell, for me, which came first,” he says. “I wish I had space in the apartment to have more sculpture.”
Jason Lujan at MKG 127
Medhat’s a fan of Toronto artist Jason Lujan, so he went looking for his newest Pachinko Playfield works at MKG 127. “He finds these intersections within culture: Japanese culture, his own Indigenous culture, pop culture,” says Medhat. “He does it in interesting ways that I haven’t seen anyone else really do.”
Phuong Nguyen SSEW Project and Tian Contemporain
Tam and Kaur were both won over by the work of Phuong Nguyen, a Toronto artist who’s showing at two booths: SSEW Project and Tian Contemporain. Her lush paintings are often framed with hand-carved scenes and embellished with colourful weaving. Kaur finds the contrast of materials exciting. “The hand-carved quality of the wood softens the visual impact,” she says.
Tam felt a kinship between her work and Nguyen’s. “I guess I kind of relate [to it] because there’s themes of ornamentalism, exoticism and Chinoiserie” — elements which appear in her work, as well.
“That’s the fun thing about the fair: discovering artists you might not have come across before,” says Tam. And with Nguyen’s work, she was left wanting more in the best way possible. “I want to see where she’s going to go.”
Art Toronto 2025 is at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre through Sunday, Oct. 26. www.arttoronto.ca.
