Hugo Canoilas: Hold Your Breath
October 4, 2025–February 7, 2026
Oakville Ontario L6J 1L6
Canada
Oakville Galleries presents solo exhibitions by Andreia Santana and Hugo Canoilas, both 2025 artists in residence, opening on Saturday October 4, 2–5pm. The Ship of Tolerance by Ilya & Emilia Kabakov remains lakeside at Gairloch Gardens until September 2026.
Andreia Santana: A Door Handle, A Handshake
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
October 4, 2025 to February 7, 2026
A Door Handle, A Handshake is Andreia Santana's first solo exhibition in North America. Developed during her residency at Oakville Galleries, the exhibition features a new series of sculptures that respond directly to the gallery architecture and surrounding environment.
The exhibition title quotes Juhani Pallasmaa from her book, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, as a metaphorical comparison emphasizing the first tactile impression a person has with a building. Just as a handshake can portray a sense of someone's character, a door handle communicates and reinforces its connection to the user, and the architectural experience through touch, material, and design. Consciously arranged in the gallery space, her translucent, metal-mesh sculptures integrate the interior architecture of the space and the external landscape of the garden, while also revealing near-invisible glass elements within their interiors. Exploring themes of authorship, gender, and the relationship between language and the self, the exhibition references Canadian author Lisa Robertson’s first novel The Baudelaire Fractal and Canadian artist Ron Baird's commissioned public art works and interventions from the 1970s to the 1980s. With a practice focused mainly on sculpture, Andreia Santana’s works are often marked by a minimalist approach. Her sculptures convey fragility, vulnerability and a poetic force. Her work often explores notions of collective “transcorporeality” and material performativity, utilizing sculpture as a platform for interventions that incorporate movement and action.
Andreia Santana (Lisbon, 1991) lives and works in New York and Vienna. Her work has been exhibited at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Porto); CCB (Lisbon); MAAT (Lisbon); In Extenso (Clermont-Ferrand); CIAJG (Guimarães); Hangar (Lisbon); Spazio Leonardo — Generali (Milan); Sans Titre (Paris); Wiener Art Foundation (Vienna); Chiado 8/Culturgest (Lisbon); UNA (Milan); Filomena Soares Gallery (Lisbon); Scherben (Berlin); Galeria Municipal do Porto; Hunter College Galleries, and Louis Reed (New York).
Hugo Canoilas: Hold Your Breath
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
October 4, 2025 to February 7, 2026
Hold Your Breath is Hugo Canoilas’s first solo exhibition in Canada. The exhibition presents an enormous, amorphous painting covering the entire Centennial Gallery space. Visitors are guided throughout this installation, encouraged to explore and walk over the artwork. The material, arrangement and mise en scene of Hold Your Breath was initially developed as an operatic set for Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Bregenzer Festspielhaus in Austria. This new presentation at Oakville Galleries reflects Canoilas's practice of revising and recontextualizing large-scale works to adapt to the context and architecture of different exhibition spaces. Canoilas' immersive work features deep-sea imagery, including a microscopic view of an octopus's skin, a seashell, and a large siphonophore, symbolizing symbiosis and mutualism. The painting installation also consciously contrasts the celestial light of historical painting with the pure white of modern art. Images emerge from the darkness, evoking the mystery of nature.
This exhibition is generously supported by the Federal Chancellery of Austria.
Hugo Canoilas (Lisbon, 1977) lives and works in Vienna. Recent solo exhibitions include CAV, Coimbra; the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon; Mumok, Vienna; and the Serralves Museum, Porto. Recent institutional exhibitions include Manifesta 15, Barcelona; Kunstverein in Hamburg; De Appel, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg; and the 30th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo. He initiated and co-edited the OEI Publication #80-81 "The Zero Alternative: Ernesto de Sousa: Portuguese Art and other aesthetic operators in Portuguese Art and Poetry from 1960's onwards." His work has been reviewed in The Guardian, Público, Expresso, Der Standard, Mousse Magazine, Art Review, Artforum, Flash Art, Revista Contemporanea, and Umbigo. Canoilas has published in institutional catalogs and in printed and online magazines. In 2020 he received the Kapsch-mumok Prize in Vienna. From 2018 to 2021, he organized the collective project "A Gruta" at Galeria Quadrado Azul in Lisbon. In 2024, Canoilas presented "Hold Your Breath," an opera produced in collaboration with Éna Brennan and David Pountney, organized by Kunsthaus Bregenz and Bregenzer Festspielehaus.
Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: The Ship of Tolerance
Gairloch Gardens
Until September
Welcoming many visitors daily, The Ship of Tolerance continues to compel visitors to envision our future together with hope, resilience, imaginative foresight and a global conscience. After engaging in workshops with the artists and gallery team, two thousand children created paintings that express their visions of tolerance and how that influences robust notions of humanitarianism in society. These paintings make up the ship’s sails. The Ship of Tolerance is presented in collaboration with the Ilya and Emilia Kabakov Foundation, and with The National Gallery of Canada. The National Gallery of Canada’s National Engagement initiative is generously supported by Michael Nesbitt, with additional funding from the National Gallery of Canada Foundation.
Ilya & Emilia Kabakov have long been amongst the most celebrated artists of our times, widely known as pioneers of installation art. Ilya and Emilia began their artistic partnership in the late 1980s, and were married in 1992. Together, they have produced a prolific output of total installations, paintings and other conceptual works addressing ideas of utopia, dreams, and fear, all reflective of the universal human condition. Their work has been exhibited world-wide in leading museums and biennials. ArtNews Magazine listed the Kabakovs amongst the ten most important living artists in the world. Since Ilya passed away in 2023, Emilia continues realizing their projects into the future.
All curatorial programming is by Séamus Kealy, Executive Director.
About Oakville Galleries
Oakville Galleries is a contemporary art museum in two locations presenting international and Canadian artists. Housed in a unique lakeside mansion in the magnificent Gairloch Gardens and a white cube gallery downtown, Oakville Galleries is one of Canada’s leading contemporary art institutions. Supported by The Town of Oakville, Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, sponsors, patrons and members.
