The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is getting set to shift into summer mode and open its doors Monday through Sunday for the fair-weather season. The public will have even more opportunities to discover the Museum’s vast collection in addition to the three new exhibitions that will be available.
In a Canadian exclusive, the MMFA will showcase Flemish masterworks from The Phoebus Foundation’s collection. It will also present a new body of works from Winnipeg artist Wanda Koop. Thirdly, it will draw from its storage one of the most iconic series by Andō Hiroshige, master landscape printmaker, which will take us on a journey to Japan of the late Edo period.
Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks
This major exhibition shines a spotlight on The Phoebus Foundation’s world-class collection of Flemish art. It will transport the public to the Southern Netherlands of the 15th to the 18th century (today mainly Flanders, Belgium) during a dynamic period of social, scientific, economic and artistic development. Spanning close to 300 years, it bears witness to the role Flemish artists played in asserting this tiny, yet influential, region’s place in a fast-changing world.
The nearly 150 works on display, including paintings by celebrated artists Anthony van Dyck, Hans Memling, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens and Michaelina Wautier, address timeless themes of vice, virtue, desire and folly. The selected works comprise monumental paintings, sculptures, maps and silverwork. Furthermore, the exhibition is complemented by a dozen or so masterpieces from the MMFA’s prestigious collection, featuring paintings by such masters as Adriaen Isenbrandt, Jan Fyt and Jan Brueghel the Elder.
April 11 – August 4, 2024
Wanda Koop
WHO OWNS THE MOON
Winner of a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2016), Wanda Koop is one of Canada’s most renowned artists of her generation. Her work has been the subject of some sixty solo exhibitions in Canada and abroad. Born in Vancouver to parents from the Zaporijjia region (present-day Ukraine), the artist lives and works in Winnipeg.
For her first monographic museum presentation in Quebec, Koop is unveiling an entirely new body of work. In these twenty or so paintings, the artist expresses her engagement with her family history. The trauma of the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe was, in fact, the point of departure in these painterly meditations on issues of territory, the environment, memory, loss and ever-present war. With the all-seeing moon as its central motif, the exhibition invites us to reflect on our relationship to history and the most pressing questions of our time.
April 27 – September 8, 2024
東海道 Tōkaidō
Dreamscapes by Andō Hiroshige
In the 19th century, the Tōkaidō was one of the most travelled roads in Japan. Towards the end of the Edo period, Andō Hiroshige revolutionized the woodblock publishing industry when he illustrated scenes of everyday life unfolding at the 53 relay stations along the famous route that connected the Tokugawa capital of Japan, Edo (today Tokyo), to the former imperial capital of Japan, Kyōto. Inspired by earlier travel guides and magazines in circulation, this print series sparked a desire in the masses to take the nearly 500-kilometre journey on foot. This imaginary work treats the landscape and its atmospheric appeal as subjects in their own right, a novelty in Japan at that time.
This exhibition presents the very first edition of the “Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō” in its entirety, which was published by Hoeidō and Senkakudō publishing houses in 1833 and entered into the MMFA’s collection in 1972. The show looks at the talent of Hiroshige and his team as the makers of a world people wanted to buy into and inhabit, as well as at the publishing industry that made the dream come true. It also examines the factors that led to these prints becoming an astronomical commercial success and fuelled the emergence of Japonisme in Europe.
– JC