Past Exhibitions

During summer months, the WAG’s Rooftop Sculpture Garden is open for all to enjoy! A striking selection of 20th and 21st century bronze, steel, and stone sculptures by Canadian and European artists will keep you company.

Into the Light is the first exhaustive survey of the influential Manitoba modernist, and Group of Seven member, in 40 years.

WAG Studio’s annual celebration of children’s art is an opportunity for the students in our art classes to express themselves in creative ways for all to see.

Art Nouveau, one of the most popular European movements of the period, was highly influential to Phillips’s work.

The Manitoba artist Ivan Eyre has concentrated on objectively exploring universal themes throughout his career.

Prayer is an ongoing project, remade around the world since its first presentation in the artist’s home city of Cape Town in 2000.

subsist brings together a selection of works that reflect political, economic, and social systems of subsistence in individual and collective continuation of cultural practices for survival.

The artist’s gender fluid, time travelling alter-ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, takes you on a journey through Canada’s history.

This collection of carvings produced by Inuit artists from across the country offers a window into traditional life and ways of knowing in the North.

This exhibition brings together more than 100 miniature carvings by Inuit artists from over a dozen communities across Nunavut including Cape Dorset, Kugaaruk, and Rankin Inlet.

Winnipeg’s North End occupies roughly 12-square kilometers built around the central Main Street artery north of the city’s vast urban railyards.

This exhibition brings together objects, archives, books, and works of art to reveal the multiple identities and histories of Winnie-the-Pooh. “Pooh” is a hugely popular…

In this exhibition drawn entirely from the Assiniboine Park Conservancy (APC)’s collection, you will experience Phillips’ typical scenic and tranquil representations of human presence within the natural environment.

Vision Exchange: Perspectives from India to Canada is Manitoba’s first major exhibition celebrating contemporary artists with roots in India.

Step into the swirl of conversations between historical icons in portraits.

This exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, and sculpture from a pivotal period in Ivan Eyre’s career, when he developed his most defining imagery.

Experience a few stunning carvings from the world-renowned collection Inuit art at the WAG. The most common material used by Inuit artists is stone, and the type of stone is dependent upon what can be hand-quarried locally.

Ocean + Outport is the WAG’s first solo exhibition of work by celebrated printmaker and painter David Blackwood.

The latest exhibit from the WAG’s New Contemporary series reveals what is rarely seen by the public—the artist’s process in their studio and their research from the museum vault.

The creative spirit of the Baker Lake community is epitomized in the art of wall hangings, or nivinngajuliaaq in Inuktitut.

In their varied scale, form, and surface treatment, Robert Archambeau’s ceramic works offer a remarkable palette of colours, textures, and glazes.

Androgyny expresses his view of the fluidity and interconnectedness of life, as well as gender. In 1983 he offered this mural, in a decolonizing gesture of reconciliation, to the people of Canada.

Learn about Inuit life on the land through this exhibition that features 26 captivating drawings recently purchased by the WAG, as well as striking wall hangings and sculptures.

The 80s Image explores the curious resiliency of painting and still-photography throughout the decade, and artists’ responsiveness to the rapidly expanding media landscape-video, television, cinema, satellite and computer imagery, and billboard advertising.

Wanda Koop’s new suite of paintings, VIEW from HERE, both affirms and disrupts two quite different genres: landscape and portraiture. Using ink and acrylic on canvas, these nine-by-seven-foot works use landscape tropes to compose immense and surreal human heads that seem to float in ambiguous space.

Ways of Seeming brings together key contemporary acquisitions purchased by the WAG between 2008 and 2016. View the work of a dozen photographers, painters, sculptors, and craft artists with an interest in the way that things-objects and ideas-are not always what they seem.

In this exhibition, you’ll get to know some of the most beloved artists of all time: Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Morisot, Renoir, Matisse, and many others.

Nunatsiavut, the Inuit region of Canada that achieved self-government in 2005, produces art that is distinct within the world of Canadian and circumpolar Inuit art.

This exhibition features work by more than 30 groundbreaking women artists of the Modernist period in Canada, who not only challenged artistic conventions but defied constraints on women’s roles in the decades after the Victorian era.

organic, an intimate exhibition featuring Tess Michalik (New York, NY) and Chantal Dupas (Winnipeg, MB) is a mélange of Michalik’s colorful, sumptuously layered oil floral paintings with Dupas’ finely drawn and meticulously painted botanical illustrations.

Shaman Stories brings together the work of two highly influential artists for whom the human and spirit worlds, and the messengers who navigate those worlds-shamans-loom large.

Fairfield Stechesen’s artistic project, which she referred to as “The Garden,” is a testament to the Portage la Prairie-raised artist’s passion for and knowledge of the flora of this province.

This exhibition is redemptive and uplifting, reminding each one of us how beautiful life is, and what a gift.

NGC@WAG’s 12th exhibition to date brings the work of David Altmejd to Winnipeg. The Vessel (2011) features plaster casts of the artist’s hands which serve as heads of graceful swans in flight.

For over 60 years, Pitaloosie Saila has contributed to the Cape Dorset print collections. She is the sole remaining active artist from the earliest years of printmaking in the community with a remarkable body of work: roughly 1,450 drawings and over 165 prints.

This collection considers political insurgency and cultural resurgence to radically shift our understanding of Canada, now and in the future.

Landscapes & Still Lifes incorporates a selection of 11 paintings from the WAG’s permanent collection by one of Manitoba’s most renowned artists.

This exhibition is the first retrospective of work by Oviloo Tunnillie (1949-2014), one of the most respected Inuit sculptors from the Canadian Arctic.

Acquired in 1957, the entire Suite is rarely displayed due to its fragility, and only a handful of the original complete sets remain in the world. Exploring the tension between man and beast that often characterized Picasso and his work, The Vollard Suite represents both the civilizing nature of art and provocative yet quintessential representation of Picasso’s “beast within.” 

Get ready for Manitoba’s first major showcase of work by Pablo Picasso in over 40 years. This summer, the WAG presents Picasso in Canada and Picasso: Man and Beast, two exhibitions highlighting the many sides of Picasso, who remains one of the greatest artists of all time.

Celebrating the best and brightest in Canadian contemporary art and craft, this year’s Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts exhibition will showcase the work of eight outstanding laureates: Michèle Cournoyer, Mike Hoolboom, Shelagh Keeley, Glenn Lewis, Landon Mackenzie, Philip Monk, Shelley Niro, and Pamela Ritchie.

Artists have been creating still life paintings for centuries. In fact, it’s one of the oldest genres in the history of art. At first glance, the still life may appear uncomplicated. Its components – flowers, plants, domestic articles, and foodstuffs – are familiar with everyday life.

Starting with Rodin brings together nearly 30 works of art from the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s permanent collection to reflect on the looming presence of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) in art history, his adaptation of earlier classical themes, and impact on later modernists.

Using a pantograph-like device that aided with the reproduction of sculptures in various sizes and materials, Rodin created a colossal version (double in size to the original) in 1902 as an independent work.

This large video, text, portraiture, and surfboard exhibition is by Australian contemporary artist Vernon Ah Kee. Ah Kee relies on his Aboriginal identity as a framework to produce art; his Indigenous familial identities are intrinsic to his work.

Travelling to Nanaimo Art Gallery this fall!

The iconic photographs of American artist and engineer Harold “Doc” Edgerton (1903-1990) offer a view of the undetectable.

Winnipeg’s own Karel Funk is known for his mesmerizing portraits of lone figures. As the largest and first true survey of his work, this retrospective brings together paintings from across North America.

In Anishnaabemowin, qua’yuk tchi’gae’win means “the honour of righting a wrong.”

In conjunction with Chagall: Daphnis & Chloé, this focus exhibit tells the little-known tale of friendship that developed between Chagall and former WAG Director, Dr. Ferdinand Eckhardt, through a series of letters, photographs, and artworks.

Russian-born Jewish artist Marc Chagall was a pioneer of modernism. Picasso proclaimed that after Matisse, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.”

The WAG presented Esther Warkov’s first solo exhibition in 1964. Since then, the Gallery has acquired nearly 50 works by Warkov, spanning her career as one of Manitoba’s most distinctive artists.

Our Land: Contemporary Art from the Arctic is the result of a collaboration between the GN and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. The title, “Our Land,” is the translation of the Inuktitut word “Nunavut”.

The partnership between the WAG and the Governments of Nunavut and Manitoba allows the public to experience the rarely-seen collection until it has a permanent home in Nunavut. Marvel at some of the carvings and wall-hangings from the approximately 7,500 works on loan to the WAG for five years.

As part of the Olympus exhibition, the WAG is partnering with local athletes and organizations to celebrate modern day gods and goddesses.

The WAG holds in trust a total of 94 works of art by the founding members of the Group of Seven.
Formed in 1920 as a friendly gathering of like-minded artists at Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club, the Group is today a celebrated institution within Canadian art history. Their reputation was forged at a crucial time, during this country’s coming of age following World War I. The Group’s legacy was secured after they officially disbanded in 1933.