Toronto: Maxim Dondyuk White Series: Meditations on War

October 15 – December 19, 2025
Reception Wed, Oct 15, 6–8pm
CONTACT Gallery
80 Spadina Ave, Suite 205

World-renowned Canadian-Ukrainian photographer Edward Burtynsky is pleased to present the international premiere of Ukrainian photographer Maxim Dondyuk’s White Series: Meditations on War in partnership with CONTACT Gallery.

The exhibition showcases ten hauntingly beautiful photographs and two high resolution murals, all created during the winter months between 2022-2024, on liberated territories of Ukraine that had previously been occupied by Russian forces. Revealed in a palette of harsh whites, chilled greys, and muted browns, the images of Dondyuk’s White Series demand a breathless kind of contemplation, leaving little room to ignore the stark realities of how both our internal and external landscapes respond to what is left behind after war.

The exhibition will be complemented by a fundraising campaign, where 50% of proceeds from the sale of a special donation edition (25 prints, $1,500.00 CAD each) of Untitled 02, Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Winter 2023 will be donated to UA.Ants, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that unites volunteers from all over Ukraine.

The gallery will be open Wed–Fri, 11am-5pm, or by appointment for the duration of the exhibition.

Maxim Dondyuk (b.1983, Ukraine) is a research-based photographer and artist who combines fieldwork, historical inquiry, and personal reflections with the medium of photography, video, text, and archival materials. His regular interests include history, memory, conflict, and their enduring impact. His recent projects examine the meanings of war, nuclear energy, and their impact on human perception. His work has received international acclaim, marked by prestigious awards including the 2022 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, being named International Photographer of the Year at the Lucie Awards, and becoming a finalist for the Prix Pictet Photography Prize. His art has been exhibited worldwide, in venues such as the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, Somerset House in London, MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome, the House of Lucie in Budapest, International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva, and L’Arsenal in Bastia among others.

Images:
Maxim Dondyuk, Untitled 10, Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Winter 2024.
Maxim Dondyuk, Untitled 02, Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Winter 2023.
More information about the event here

Canada: Between Worlds: Barbara Cole traverses her artistic evolution in new exhibition & book release at Bau-Xi Gallery

The solo exhibition spans decades of the photographer’s work & coincides with the grand opening of the gallery’s new location in Toronto.

Fine art photographer Barbara Cole reveals the pioneering trajectory of her decades-long career in Between Worlds, a solo exhibition at Bau-Xi Gallery, on view September 5 – 30, 2023. Following the recent release of her new book, Between Worlds, published by teNeues publishing house, Cole’s exhibition at Bau-Xi Gallery mirrors the book’s holistic narrative by tracing Cole’s inventor-like spirit and painterly approach to photography sustained over the decades as well as where her work is heading next. The exhibition gathers works that span various points throughout her career as well as new works, together examining the ways she has experimented with photographic mediums to create imagery that is inventive, timeless, and dreamlike. The exhibition features several different bodies of work, including: selections from the new series Somewhere that evolves her signature underwater photography of the female form suspended within heavily adorned architectural spaces to create phantasmagoric scenes; selections from the series Shadow Dancing, her wet collodion practice in which she revitalizes the 19th Century photographic process with contemporary experimentation to create three-dimensional dance between light and shadow; selections of lenticulars that, paired with her underwater imagery, create an illusion of depth and weightlessness; and others. The exhibition coincides with the grand opening of Bau-Xi Gallery’s expansive new location on Dufferin Street on September 9, 2023. In tandem with artist Gavin Lynch’s concurrent exhibition, Between Worlds is the first formal exhibition to open at the new location. The artist will be in attendance for the opening reception on September 7, 2023, as well as for an artist talk, Q&A, and book signing on September 30, 2023.

More info about Barbara Cole: HERE
More information about the exhibition: HERE

Toronto: Ecology of a Landscape

 

More information: HERE

Barbara Edwards Contemporary is pleased to present our inaugural exhibition for BEC Project Space at 315 King Street West. Ecologies of Landscape gathers work by nine highly accomplished artists from Canada and abroad to re-imagine our perceptual, aesthetic, and ethical relationships with our home planet. In diverse media and from a variety of cultural and geographical perspectives, these artists ponder what our connections to the Earth might be in this time of widespread concern about climate change. Especially in Canada, landscape painting has been the dominant way to approach and appreciate what we construe as 'nature' as well as our own identities. With increasing urgency since the 1960s, however, artists worldwide have grappled with the inadequacies of the landscape genre amidst concerns over land stewardship and the environmental degradation of our shared planet. Works in this exhibition reconceive land and landscape as presented and experienced in art.

Ecologies of Landscape challenges us to reconsider what art and artists can contribute to the ecological future of the Earth, what 'being terrestrial' means for each of us. British European artist Tacita Dean photographs the stunning oddities of Madagascan Baobab trees. Bonnie Devine's Radiation and Radiance drawings and Canoe: to the North Shore narrate the discovery of uranium near Elliot Lake in the Algoma region of northern Ontario and its impact on the Anishinaabe Ojibwa of the Serpent River First Nation, to which she belongs. Documenting a rock on an Icelandic glacier from all sides, Olafur Eliasson's photo series The small glacier surfer sets the long game of geological change against the time it takes for a human being to move around an object. Isabelle Hayeur disrupts the seductive beauty of conventional underwater photography with a troubling image of Spirogyra - a plant that thrives on pollutants left by humans - photographed in Québec's Eastern Townships. Reflecting on the horrors of missing and murdered Indigenous women, Shelley Niro's photographs recall landscape photography in a familiar role, that of nature as a refuge from a violent human world. James Nizam employs the magic of the camera obscura to create two still images focusing our gaze on that most fundamental diurnal phenomenon, the rising and setting of the sun. Reinhard Reitzenstein's meticulous 'text' drawings of trees intone a profound reverence for these arboreal beings. British artist Simon Starling's digital video and stills titled Project for a Rift Valley Crossing - set in the Dead Sea area of the Middle East - hypnotically involve us in the material and conceptual dimensions of our interactions with land and water. Paul Walde's video Tom Thomson Centennial Swim returns to a regional obsession about landscape art and the land, commemorating Thomson's mysterious death on Canoe Lake in 1917.

Ecologies of Landscape is curated by Mark A. Cheetham, University of Toronto. His book Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature Since the '60s was published in 2018. Neda Omidvar, Director at Barbara Edwards Contemporary, is the Assistant Curator.


Ecologies of Landscape
Tacita Dean, Bonnie Devine, Olafur Eliasson, Isabelle Hayeur, Shelley Niro, James Nizam, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Simon Starling, Paul Walde


Curated by Mark A. Cheetham

10 November to 26 January 2019
OPENING RECEPTION 10 NOVEMBER, 6 - 9pm
CURATOR REMARKS @ 7pm
RSVP to neda@becontemporary.com by 9 NOVEMBER

Barbara Edwards Contemporary
BEC Project Space
315 King St. West, 2nd Floor, Toronto