2016 Fall Exhibitions Calendar at the MMFA
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is pleased to present a rich exhibition programme this fall, a season that will include the opening of the new Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion for Peace in November. With programming spotlighting diversity, the MMFA is pursuing its broad social and humanist mission: it intends to support the struggle against homophobia, AIDS and racism, and reinforce social inclusion as well as the presence of women artists at the Museum.
Note that the summer schedule ends on 5 September. Thereafter, the Museum will be closed on Mondays.
Major Exhibition
A Canadian exclusive at the MMFA, Focus: Perfection – Robert Mapplethorpe is the first major North American retrospective – and the first in Canada – on American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre since the landmark exhibition The Perfect Moment organized in 1988, and the US Culture Wars. The MMFA brings together two exhibitions presented at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), through the outstanding donation of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. The MMFA is proud to host the only Canadian presentation of this exhibition, which features some 250 works by one of the most influential and controversial photographers of the twentieth century, renowned for his masterful compositions and subjects that have compelled new reflection on questions of gender, race and sexuality.
Discovery Exhibitions
The exhibition Toulouse-Lautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque, which is enjoying a lively success with already more than 70,000 visitors, continues until October 30. This is an extraordinary opportunity to admire close to a hundred prints and posters by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the French artist who captured like none other the heart of Parisian nightlife during the Belle Époque at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Starting October 19, as part of La Biennale de Montréal 2016, the MMFA will welcome the internationally renowned artist Kerry James Marshall. Considered to be one of the most important American artists of his generation, Marshall questions the representation of Afro-Americans in society and the history of art through a multidisciplinary oeuvre that runs from painting to comic strips.
A feminine echo of the Museum’s major retrospective of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, She Photographs brings together 70 works by 30 contemporary photographers from here and abroad. This rich body of work includes, among others, recent acquisitions of works by Geneviève Cadieux, Éliane Excoffier, Maryse Goudreau, Angela Grauerholz and Alix Cléo Roubaud. It is an opportunity to observe the many themes and approaches that constitute the contemporary feminine gaze.
Until November 13, the Museum is presenting the exhibition She Century by Quebec artist Julie Favreau. Executed in 2015 during her residency at the Darling Foundry (the fourth residency there sponsored by the MMFA), this project explores, through video, photography and sculpture, the evocative and symbolic charge that a gesture that can be revealed by the interaction between an object and a gesture.
Until December 11, the Museum’s Graphic Arts Centre becomes a theatre of dark fantasies of the human subconscious with some of the nineteenth century’s great graphic artists in the exhibition “The Black Sun of Melancholy” ̶ Monsters of the Unconscious, From Goya and Blake to Redon and Munch. This exhibition brings together drawings and lithographs by sixteen romantic artists who delved the depths of their creative imagination to evoke strong feelings in the beholder.
