Remai Modern: Saskatoon’s Museum of Modern Art

Pablo Picasso is defined not only by his prolific and influential art career, but by his vigorous appetite for life. Once celebrated as part of his larger-than-life persona, his passionate affairs and sexual exploits are now seen as problematic.

Through a selection of Picasso’s linocuts alongside works by numerous other artists in Remai Modern’s collection, Regarding Desire centres on images of the body as a site of longing. While acknowledging the familiarity of the human form and the pleasure of desire, the exhibition also reveals dynamics of consent and representation.

Maanipokaa’iini is the first-ever survey of the work of the Siksika Nation artist Adrian Stimson. Across installation, painting, photography, video and live performance, Stimson re-signifies colonial history through humour and counter-memory. The exhibition features significant works from Stimson’s nearly 20-year practice that explore identity construction, the centrality of the bison to Blackfoot spirituality and survival, and the intergenerational impacts of the residential school system. These interconnected areas of focus form an encompassing vision wherein the fraught history of Indigenous-settler relations on the Plains is simultaneously mourned and turned on its head.

Both Remai Modern and its predecessor the Mendel Art Gallery benefitted from extraordinary gifts of art from their namesakes. In the 1960s, the Mendel family gave 13 paintings — now called the Mendel Gift — to the museum. Almost 50 years later, Ellen Remai made her own major gift of art by donating a collection of linocuts by Pablo Picasso to Remai Modern. Artworks from both gifts have become touchstones for our visitors. Our shared collection, which now numbers more than 8,000 works, is built from this history.

This exhibition brings together the Mendel Art Gallery’s first major donation with a selection of Picasso linocut prints contributed by Remai through the Frank and Ellen Remai Foundation.