De Montigny Contemporary

10/01/2026

We are thrilled to announce the placement of two early works by Norman Takeuchi into the National Gallery of Canada collection. This is the museum's first acquisition of his work. Congratulations, Norman!

Norman Takeuchi was born in Vancouver in 1937. During World War II, he and his family were among the thousands of Japanese Canadians forcibly removed from the West Coast, an experience that would have a lasting impact on his life and work.

Takeuchi studied at the Vancouver School of Art before establishing his career in Ottawa. His practice evolved from abstraction toward a deeper exploration of his Japanese Canadian identity, bringing traditional Japanese imagery into conversation with contemporary abstraction.

His work has been widely exhibited and is held in major public and corporate collections, including the TD Bank Collection, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Canadian War Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Ottawa Art Gallery.

Norman Takeuchi, Prisoner, 1968, acrylic on linen, 39 x 28 in.

Norman Takeuchi, Self Portrait - Memories, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 in.

DM or email [email protected] for more information on the artist.

06/04/2026

😻We love this painting by Megan McDonald ()

Megan Ellen MacDonald, The Favorite
Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 Inches, Unframed, 2026

MacDonald’s paintings challenge the pre-established aesthetic hierarchy by creating a visual language out of diminutive and feminine things. Her still-life arrangements - first “sketched” using 3D software and documented as paintings -  depict intimate and destructive relationships between objects as an exploration of what it means to embrace femininity and power.

06/03/2026

Guy Maddin’s (.maddin) tour-de-force series, A Memory Is Born, is on view at DMC until June 12! Not to be missed. Here are some of our favourites from the series. Link in bio to available works left - DM us for more info!

Guy Maddin has directed thirteen feature-length movies, most recently Rumours (2024), starring Cate Blanchett and Roy Dupuis; as well as The Forbidden Room (2015), My Winnipeg (2007), and The Saddest Music in the World (2003). He has also mounted over 70 performances of his films around the world, featuring live elements—orchestra, sound effects, singing, and narration—most recently The Green Fog (2016), which was accompanied live by the Kronos Quartet. His screenplay collaborators include Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro and poet John Ashbery. His movies Archangel (1990) & The Heart of the World (2000) both won America’s National Society of Film Critics awards for Best Experimental Film. For the past 15 years, he has partnered with co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson. Maddin started making collages to inspire screenplay ideas, plan shoots, teach himself about colour, and calm his nerves. He is now hooked on the practice. 

From Left to Right: Guy Maddin, A Memory is born 73, 68, 66, 64, 55, 53, 52, 50, 45, 44, 43, 23, 14, 11, 2026, 8x10 inches, collage on matte board

05/28/2026

OPENING TONIGHT! Judy Nakagawa – Complicated Heart at Karsh-Masson Gallery

Reception from 5:30 to 7:30, City Hall, 110 Laurier Ave W, Ottawa, ON K1P 1J1

Judy Nakagawa’s (.sculptor) sculptures register at first encounter through their delicate fragility. Beneath this apparent lightness lies a lasting materiality that conveys quiet endurance. The tension between fragility and resilience resonates as an analogue for memory itself—ephemeral, yet persistent. Viewed through this lens, the works reflect Nakagawa’s Japanese Canadian family history, interpreted through her own emotional perspective and lived experiences.  

Nakagawa works with quiet focus, guided by a visceral intuition rather than logic and reason. Her practice is shaped by her Japanese Canadian heritage, nature and the rituals of daily life. Though she does not speak Japanese, her appreciation of traditional Japanese dance, modern dance and Butoh informs her sculptural sensitivity to movement and space. Nakagawa’s aesthetic resonates with Japanese sculpture and with artists such as Chiharu Shiota, whose use of simple materials creates forms that feel expansive yet light.
- Excerpt by Machiko Townson

 studied at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., where she received the coveted Berthold Schmutzhart Award for Sculpture. Since then, she has created both large- and small-scale works that have appeared in theatrical productions, institutional spaces, retail environments and private collections. Her work has been exhibited at notable venues, including the National Press Building in Washington, D.C.; the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre in Burnaby, B.C.; the Britannia Shipyards National Historic Site in Richmond, B.C.; the Vancouver International Dance Festival; the City of Ottawa; and the Ottawa Art Gallery. She has exhibited in private galleries in Vancouver and Ottawa, and very recently showed a major work at Art Toronto with de Montigny Contemporary.

Last two 📸 by David Barbour

05/27/2026

We are thrilled to announce that the Nasjonalmuseet, Norway's National Museum, has acquired the sculpture Amorous Couple by Canadian-Iranian multidisciplinary artist Rah Eleh. This marks the first placement of Eleh's work in a European museum and the first acquisition of the artist's work by the Nasjonalmuseet.

Amorous Couple is a 3D-printed sculpture by Iranian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist Rah Eleh. Created in 2025, the eye-catching, life-size artwork reimagines a 17th-century Mughal illustration and is celebrated as a rare visual record of female same-sex desire in Islamic art history.

The two q***r figures are inspired by a 17th-century Mughal miniature, currently housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The sculpture on the left, identified as the king’s guard, is an androgynous figure who exhibits a mustache and an extended hairline. The figure on the right represents an aristocrat and one of the king’s many wives. Historical writings note that such guards would pleasure the wives with carrots and cucumbers in the secluded women’s quarters.

In the original depiction, the attire symbolizes status and the hierarchical relationship between them. In response, many revisions were made to mitigate these power dynamics. The work is the first in a series in which I unearth and recontextualize art-historical imagery of le****ns, bringing it into the contemporary moment for reconsideration and monumentalization.

Details: Rah Eleh, Amorous Couple, 3D Print, PLA, wood, 46 x 33 Inches, Approx. 5'2" each figure, 2025

Video: From the Nasjonalmuseet

05/14/2026

SAVE THE DATE! June 18 - 𝐆𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐊𝐢𝐧𝐠 - 𝐌𝐚𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐬

Gillian King is a visual artist, art therapist, registered psychotherapist (CRPO Qualifying), and art educator based on Treaty One Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She holds an MFA from the University of Ottawa (2016) and a Master’s in Art Therapy from the Toronto Art Therapy Institute (2023). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and featured in Border Crossings, Canadian Art, Create! Magazine, and CBC Gem. Gillian has received several awards, including the Espronceda Centre for the Arts and Culture Artistic Prize (Barcelona, 2019), the RBC Emerging Artist Award (2017), and the Nancy Petry Award (2017). Her exhibition history includes Galerie Karsh-Masson, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Ottawa Art Gallery, PDA Projects, General Hardware, Galerie St-Laurent+Hill, and Nicolas Robert.

Gillian King (), To Each Their Own, 2025, Acrylic, cold wax medium, synthetic and natural dyes on canvas, 60 × 96 inches (diptych)

05/12/2026

05/12/2026

Guy Maddin (.maddin) explains his new installation, A Memory Is Born, now up at DMC! Link to the digital catalogue in gallery bio!

“After forty years of filmmaking, I have come to think of my life only in visual terms, in pictures sketched, jumbled up in almost no order at all, then remembered poorly. My autobiography would NEVER be a series of sentences packed into chapters that fill out a memoir that might sit on a shelf of books. Rather, what I recall of my time on this planet is laid out before me in sequences of something like movie storyboards, those elemental blueprints of filmic preparation, the syntax of cinematic expression itself. So, I’ve come to revisit and reread my past by shuffling through these pictorial vocabulary units. As with all memories, these are clustered, disorganized narratives, sometimes intensely emotional, sometimes utterly inconsequential—always fragmented. Sometimes the memories of my parents have surely been collaged onto my own. Maybe a memory is born only when two or more sensations collide? As in a collage! And all non-impacts are swiftly forgotten? Please sift through my recollected collisions kindly, for they are gentle and true.”

05/08/2026

OPENING TONIGHT! HOFFOS / MADDIN

Guy Maddin (.maddin) and David Hoffos () both construct fragmented, image-based narratives that treat memory as unstable, collaged, and deeply subjective, drawing from cinematic language and visual illusion to blur the line between reality and recollection. Through analog processes and deliberate imperfections, their practices reveal how perception, nostalgia, and personal history are continuously reconstructed rather than fixed.

04/29/2026

As Eventide featuring Stanzie Tooth () & David Kaarsemaker () comes to a close in a few days, we are thrilled to share that two artworks in this exhibit were transformed into an amazing public artwork in Toronto, located within the Bentway Staging grounds.

Toronto-based artist Stanzie Tooth presents A Persistent Crossing, a public artwork that explores the relationship between humans and the urban environments they inhabit. 

In this final commission at Staging Grounds, Tooth creates a series of images that function as thresholds between the rigid world of Toronto’s industrial grid and the fluid resilience of its urban ecology. Extending her investigation of the figure-ground relationship from the scale of paper to public architecture, the work wraps three sides of the site’s scaffolding towers, inviting viewers to reconsider themselves not as the focal point of the urban landscape but as part of its intricate ecological fabric. 

Across the large-scale images, large human silhouettes appear as open spaces filled with native Ontario vegetation and shifting skies. These absent figures act as windows into an alternative landscape within the human body, suggesting a porous boundary between people and place where the figure and ground continually shift. Imagery of local pollinators—including the Luna moth, Cecropia moth, and Monarch butterfly—grounds the work in the ecologies of both the site and southern Ontario. Moving between bright daytime scenes and indigo night skies, Tooth stages the daily urban rhythms of the city underneath the Gardiner Expressway. 

Together, these images position the site itself as a threshold between the built and the natural worlds, encouraging viewers to recognize that nature is not something separate from urban life, but a living presence woven through it.

image: site rendering of A Persistent Crossing, 2026, The Bentway Staging Grounds

Waxing and Waning, Ink on watercolour paper. 30.25 x 45 Inches, 2026

Visitor, Ink on watercolour paper., 9 x 12 Inches, 2026