This year, Art Toronto brings together Canadian and international galleries across Main, Solo, Arte Sur, and other sections, offering encounters with art that explore human experience, cultural memory, and connections to the natural world.
Among the presentations in Main, Galerie LeRoyer, offers a dynamic platform for curated exhibitions featuring Canadian and international artists. Here, two Italian artists explore human experience through linden-wood sculpture. Matthias Verginer balances realistic figures with a sense of estrangement, using pencil lines to accentuate their character and playful tensions between space and gravity to question how we perceive the world.
Matthias Verginer, Siblings
Christian Verginer, from northern Italy, combines linden wood with acrylic paint, placing human figures in dialogue with animals, trees, and everyday objects to envision a more sensitive relationship between humanity and nature, a future rooted in hope and peaceful coexistence.
Christian Verginer, Inner Wilderness II, 2026
Further exploring connections between human experience and the natural world, Galerie de Bellefeuille celebrates 46 years of bringing international art to Canada. Its presentation showcases Canadian and international artists, including Jane Waterous and Roman Feral. Canadian multidisciplinary artist Waterous captures human energy and collective joy through richly textured works that bridge painting and sculpture, with light animating their surfaces. Paris-born Feral brings luxury and nature into dialogue, pairing recognizable fashion icons with delicate butterflies arranged as if in flight. His compositions suggest perpetual movement, transforming a fleeting moment into an image of enduring beauty.
Roman Feral, Louis Vuitton Azur II, 2023, made with rare natural butterfly
Moving from gallery presentations to community-led initiatives, the Yellowknife Artist Run Community Centre makes its Art Toronto debut. The nonprofit organization supports the production and presentation of art from Yellowknife and the Northwest Territories. Its presentation includes Hana Steinward, whose beadwork explores ancestral connections and tradition, and Maura Meng, a multidisciplinary Canadian artist based in the Yellowknife area who focuses primarily on ceramic sculpture. Meng’s use of locally sourced clay and alternative firing techniques connects her practice to her off-grid life in a cabin in the Northwest Territories.
Maura Meng, Weak in the Knees, 2025
Hana Steinward, I dream of medicine, 2023
Connections to place, history, and cultural knowledge continue in Arte Sur, where Instituto de Visión, a women-led conceptual art gallery in Bogotá, presents artists Aycoobo and Olinda Silvano. Their works carry histories and knowledge not readily accessible to outsiders. Colombian artist Aycoobo’s vividly coloured drawings draw on Amazonian plant knowledge and shamanic experience, exploring connections to ancestral territory and displacement.
Aycoobo-Wilson Rodriguez, Arbo de agua 2026 (left) and Maloka ancestral, 2025 (right)
Peruvian Shipibo-Konibo artist Silvano uses traditional kené designs to express spiritual relationships with plants and the forest, making her practice a form of activism against discrimination and in defence of the Amazon and its peoples.
Olindo Silvano, Diseno de Anaconda, 2022 (left) and El poder de la planta mistico, 2024 (right)
There is more to discover in Solo, where Fazakas Gallery presents Don Yeomans, a celebrated Northwest Coast artist whose practice spans two-dimensional design, wood carving, and gold and silver jewellery. Recently commissioned to create a 15-foot totem pole, Yeomans has work in public and private collections worldwide, including UBC’s Museum of Anthropology and the Royal BC Museum.
Don Yeomans art
Fazakas Gallery also presents a solo exhibition by Métis and Cree artist Audie Murray, whose practice explores material, memory, ancestry, and care through transformation. Central to the presentation is Rootless, an installation combining approximately 100 sheets of artificial grass with live roses that naturally decay throughout the fair. Murray will turn the collected roses into pigment for future works, treating decay as a beginning rather than an end. A drawing made with rose pigment from an earlier iteration accompanies the installation.
Audie Murray, We are always Love & Rootless
Extending these encounters beyond the gallery booths, Art Toronto offers talks, special events, and more. Artists, curators, collectors, and art advisors will lead tours throughout the weekend, while the Platform Talks series brings together voices from the Canadian and international art worlds, creating further opportunities to engage with the ideas behind the work.
Text and photo: Nusrat Papia
*Exhibition information: Art Toronto, October 29 – November 1, 2026, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, North Building, Exhibit Hall A & B, 255 Front Street West. Hours: Fri – Sat 12 – 8 pm, Sun 12 – 6 pm.