There is something fitting about beginning Art Toronto with a vault. At the center of this year’s fair (which closed last weekend), Nicholas Metivier Gallery presented The Vault Collection, an expansive survey of Edward Burtynsky’s photography, bringing together rare prints and works spanning four decades of the artist’s examination of industry, landscape, and the scale of human ambition. The presentation offered a compelling opportunity to reconsider the visual legacy of a practice that has made the environmental consequences of human intervention both monumental and difficult to ignore. It was a fitting centerpiece for a fair of Art Toronto’s scale. Yet, as impressive as the presentation was, the most revealing encounters were happening elsewhere.
For her first edition as director, Emily-Jean Alexander framed the 27th edition of Art Toronto around the next generation of collectors. With over 100 exhibitors, alongside new initiatives intended to make collecting more accessible, the fair acknowledged the importance of cultivating the audience that will sustain its commercial ecosystem. However, the future of contemporary art depends just as much on who is making it, and where those practices are given room to develop. This year, that conversation was most clearly articulated in the fair’s two peripheral sections: Arte Sur and Verge.
Returning for its second edition under the curatorial direction of Karen Huber, Arte Sur brought together eleven galleries from Mexico, Central America, and South America. Although its position within the fair might suggest an additional international feature, the section offered a concentrated examination of how artistic language carries, fractures, and reinterprets cultural experience. At Arróniz, Roula Partheniou and Fabiola Menchelli’s Parallelograms (2026) explored tension through the physicality of the work itself. Its folding and material construction introduced a relationship between surface and structure in which the object’s apparent coherence was unsettled by its own form.
At La Sala Art Gallery, Alfredo Romero’s mixed-media works approached Mexican identity and history through fragmentation. Their layered compositions resisted the notion of cultural memory as a singular, continuous narrative, instead suggesting an identity assembled through discontinuous histories, images, and experiences. The resulting visual language carried a productive tension, insisting that fragmentation was a means through which complexity could remain visible.
La Balsa Arte offered another historical conversation, bringing together Colombian artists Gregorio Cuartas, Diego Arango, and Juliana Correa. Their presentation traced an evolution not only in artistic creation, but in the ways lived experience in Colombia has been interpreted and translated into visual language. Seen together, the three practices suggested that artistic expression is never separate from the conditions in which it emerges; it is continually reshaped by the changing frameworks through which a society understands itself.
Arte Sur expanded the fair’s geographic representation, but its strength lay in the curatorial proposition that these practices could be understood in conversation without being reduced to a shared regional identity. Eleven galleries may be a modest foundation for such an undertaking, but Huber’s section made a convincing case for its continued development and an argument for a broader conception of Art Toronto’s center.
That argument continued in Verge, the section dedicated to emerging galleries, where Adam Basanta’s Tower (2026), presented by de Montigny Contemporary, was perhaps the fair’s most memorable object. A kinetic sculpture constructed from CD/DVD burners from the turn of the millennium, spinning around itself as the trays open and close, Tower revisits a technology that promised personal control, speed, and access but now appears as an early stage in a much larger transformation. Accompanied by the machine-drawn works Born to Burn I and Born to Burn II, Basanta turns technological nostalgia into a sharper inquiry about the cultural systems that technology leaves behind. Humorous and elegiac, Tower recognizes that the tools once associated with freedom can also establish the conditions of new forms of control.
Elsewhere in Verge, Cry Baby Gallery’s presentation brought contrasting disciplines of Toronto-based artists into dialogue through the work of Jules Monson, Tamara “Solem” Alissa, Giorgio Cecatta, Joshua Advincula, and Ken Yau. Built on an ethos of instigating conversation, the gallery examines how space and objects interact across distinct artistic approaches. At nomadic gallery The New Other’s booth, Steven Schmid’s contribution explored the physical and psychological nuances of identity, heritage, and displacement that connected the exhibiting artists. Working on handmade paper, Schmid bridged the corporeal and the surreal, using the material’s tactile presence to give complexity and texture to questions that might otherwise remain abstract. His work resonated within a section where emerging galleries established their identities through experimentation and the relationships they construct between artists.
The Main Galleries were not without their own compelling moments. At Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, the contrasting practices of Rajni Perera and Manuel Mathieu demonstrated how distinct visual languages can approach overlapping questions of inheritance and belonging. At Daniel Faria Gallery, Oluseye’s MOTHER ROCK (2026) brought the fabrication behind his larger public artworks, specifically his monumental public work Crown Act that is found on Toronto’s Lassonde Art Trail, into focus. Translating the textures of braided hair into structural, architectural materials, the booth shared how ancestral hair practices become a language of permanence, mapping Black identity and cultural preservation onto forms designed to endure.
These presentations suggest that the most successful works at Art Toronto were often those that resisted easy categorization. These are works shaped by personal histories, material experimentation, and questions that extend beyond the conventions of a recognizable market identity. Alexander’s first edition offered a strong range of galleries and an impressive central presentation. Nonetheless, its most generative moments emerged from the margins. If the next generation of collectors is essential to the fair’s future, so too are the artists and galleries whose practices give that future meaning. The challenge for Art Toronto’s next edition is about more than bringing these voices back; it is also about reconsidering how close to the center they might be allowed to stand. —Charles Moore
Published on
