Every other year, the Focus section highlights the artistic scene of a foreign city. After showcasing Brussels in 2021 and Vienna in 2023, the fair now crosses the Atlantic to spotlight Montréal’s vibrant creative energy. Four galleries will offer a curated glimpse of the city’s artistic landscape: a concentration of practices that reflect both its cultural diversity and its spirit of experimentation.
Art Mûr (B21)
Founded in 1996 in Montréal, Art Mûr has become one of Canada’s largest private contemporary art galleries. Representing more than twenty artists, emerging and established, its program encompasses painting, sculpture, new media, and performance, with works featured in major North American collections and presented at the Venice Biennale.
Known for its dynamic program of solo and group exhibitions, the gallery emphasizes parity, representing as many artists from Québec as from other provinces, and frequently collaborates with independent curators and museums.
For the fair, the gallery presents a booth bringing together four artists whose works engage in dialogue around the body, nature, and the imagination.
Eddy Firmin’s sculptures, rooted in his Caribbean identity, carry a decolonial perspective and question representations of the Black body.
Karine Payette’s sculptural works examine our relationship with animals and the environment.
These pieces resonate with the two-dimensional works of Holly King, who composes imaginary landscapes where reality and fiction intertwine, and Hédy Gobaa, whose fragmented images explore our perception of the real.
Together, these distinct approaches create a cross-reading of contemporary issues, unfolding a complementary visual language.
Galeries Bellemare Lambert (C12)
From its very beginnings, the gallery has been committed to supporting both practices rooted in formal research and those grounded in conceptual approaches. Far from perceiving these orientations as opposites, it embraces them as complementary. This vision, sustained over time, transcends trends and demands attentive looking, while deliberately reducing reliance on imagery to reveal the subtlety of propositions—at once close yet singular. The gallery builds its identity on sharing, considering art as a living force within society that unfolds through the integrity and enthusiasm of those who engage with it wholeheartedly.
For the fair, it will present a solo exhibition of Canadian artist Jérôme Bouchard, who has been living and working in Brussels since 2021.
The booth brings together several paintings of different formats, part of his reflection on post-industrial territories in Belgium. These works, which the artist describes as “micro-disasters,” blur the boundaries between human gesture and mechanical activity, merging scientific methods, digital technology, and painterly interventions to create a space of uncertainty between destruction and creation.
Chiguer Art Contemporain (C20)
Representing some twenty Québec and Canadian artists among the most influential of their generation, Chiguer Art Contemporaine promotes the visibility of Canadian art both nationally and internationally. Supporting experimentation and research, the gallery highlights sensitive, committed, and innovative practices across a wide range of media. Founded in Québec ten years ago under the name Galerie 3, the gallery adopted its current identity in 2022 and opened a second space in Montréal’s Belgo building, in the heart of downtown. Today, active in both cultural hubs, it is directed by founder Abdelilah Chiguer, who has been deeply engaged in advancing Canadian contemporary art for more than a decade.
For the fair, the gallery will present five Canadian artists whose practices explore the notion of nordicity.
Through poetic representations of nature, they celebrate the land, evoke its wild expanses, the resilience of its fauna and flora, and the cycles that shape it.
François Simard reinterprets historic North American landscape engravings through abstract interventions;
Eveline Boulva documents the fragmentation of ice and the melting of icebergs;
Dan Brault stages Canadian species in exuberant compositions;
Annie Baillargeon enacts allegories of the seasons through her own body;
and François Morelli imagines hybrid creatures exalting interspecies coexistence.
Duran Contemporain (D19)
Based in Montréal, Duran Contemporain (formerly Duran Mashaal) has supported emerging and mid-career artists since its founding, fostering bold approaches in painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. Its demanding program combines solo shows, group exhibitions, and thematic projects, prioritizing conceptual strength and formal innovation.
Committed to long-term support for its artists, the gallery is active on the fair circuit, collaborates with curators and museums, and plays a key role in the Canadian ecosystem; its director Andrés Duran also serves as president of AGAC (Association des galeries d’art contemporain).
For the fair, the gallery will present Visions Montréalaises, an exhibition bringing together six emerging Montréal painters:
Rebecca Storm, Rosalie Gamache, Holly MacKinnon, Sylvia Trotter Ewens, Maryam Izadifard, and Michelle Paterok.
Their works, situated within the expanded field of painting, reject rigid boundaries between figuration and abstraction, addressing contemporary issues such as the instability of meaning, the politics of visibility, the role of the body, and the ethics of representation.