Spring/Summer at the Vancouver Art Gallery

The Vancouver Art Gallery Announces Exhibition Highlights
for Spring/Summer 2025

Featuring world and North American premiere exhibitions, including a major new commission,
and selections from the largest promised gift of contemporary and modern art
in the Gallery’s history

The Vancouver Art Gallery announced a bold spring/summer lineup of exhibitions to inspire visitors from around the world. The season includes the world premiere of Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar, co-commissioned with the Vega Foundation, and the first exhibition at the Gallery curated by CEO & Executive Director Anthony Kiendl. Spring also brings an ambitious exhibition dedicated to the most significant donation of international contemporary art in the Gallery’s history in Postcards from the Heart: Selections from the Brigitte and Henning Freybe Collection, as well as a landmark retrospective honouring one of Canada’s most significant artists of the twentieth century, Jean Paul Riopelle, organized by the National Gallery of Canada. Visitors can look forward to a summer of ceramics at the Gallery: the first exhibition in North America dedicated to Japanese artist Otani Workshop, alongside an exploration of British Columbia’s ceramic history told through the extraordinary collection of John David Lawrence.

“This season presents an ambitious and captivating exhibition program that will offer moments of wonder and surprise,” says Anthony Kiendl, CEO & Executive Director. “We are especially pleased to present a number of projects that have never appeared anywhere before now. We are grateful to our incredible staff who have made this exhibition program unique in the world, as well as our numerous supporters. Most of all we are grateful to these myriad artists coming together in the months ahead.”

On March 21, 2025, the Vancouver Art Gallery will present the city’s largest and most comprehensive exhibition of works by Canadian icon Jean Paul Riopelle to date. Organized by the National Gallery of Canada to mark the centenary celebration of the artist’s birth, Riopelle: Crossroads in Time brings together almost 100 works from 20 national and international private and public collections, spanning five decades of the artist’s creative journey. Guest curated by art historian and independent researcher Dr. Sylvie Lacerte, this spectacular exhibition offers an original take on Riopelle’s creative output, highlighting his thirst for freedom of expression, his yearning for innovation and his experimental approach to art making. This is the last opportunity to see the exhibition on its centenary tour.

From April 18 visitors will encounter Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar, the first major presentation of the New York–based artist’s work on the West Coast and Raven’s largest exhibition in Canada to date. This is the inaugural exhibition at the Gallery curated by Anthony Kiendl, CEO & Executive Director, and will feature the world premiere of Raven’s sculptural moving image installation Murderers Bar (2025), co-commissioned and jointly acquired by the Vancouver Art Gallery and The Vega Foundation. Together with Raven’s kinetic light installation Casters X-2 + X-3 (2021) and a series of evocative works on silk from the series Depositions (2024), this exhibition provides a timely glimpse into the expanding field of Raven’s vision—the push and pull between human intervention and the more-than-human forces of nature and the physical world.

On the other half of the second floor, visitors will journey through Postcards from the Heart: Selections from the Brigitte and Henning Freybe Collection, an ambitious exhibition of modern and contemporary artworks, spanning painting, printmaking, sculpture, film, photography and installation—gifted to the Gallery by Vancouver-based collectors Brigitte and Henning Freybe. This promised gift encompasses works by some of the most important European and North American artists working in the last 50 years, including Daniel Buren, Tacita Dean, Frank Stella, Alicja Kwade, Wolfgang Tillmans, Robert Rauschenberg, Julie Mehretu and William Kentridge, alongside celebrated BC artists Beau Dick, Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham, Brian Jungen and Jeff Wall. The exhibition title refers to the lifetime of letters and postcards sent to the Freybes from artists whose work they have collected and whom they have hosted in their home. Postcards from the Heart honours the Freybe’s transformative gesture of love to the art world: the most significant donation of international contemporary and modern art in the Gallery’s history.

Later this spring, the Gallery will host two major exhibitions that highlight the significance of ceramics across time and place—one tracing the history of British Columbia’s studio pottery movement, and the other showcasing contemporary ceramic innovation from Japan. Written in Clay presents a history of ceramics made in British Columbia told through the collection of John David Lawrence, a long-time Vancouverite, musician, performer, activist, collector and owner of local antique shop DODA ANTIQUES. Through his relationships with ceramic artists and their work, Lawrence has become a crucial figure in preserving and documenting local ceramic history. Featuring approximately 200 ceramic objects collected over four decades, this exhibition reveals the diversity of material and aesthetic approaches to ceramic production in the province. Beginning with Axel Ebring’s Scandinavian-inspired, handcrafted pottery from the 1940s, the exhibition explores the range of influences that affected the development and proliferation of ceramic practices in BC, from Scandinavian utilitarianism and the studio pottery movement of Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada to the Arts and Crafts movement, and Japanese Raku. A few of the featured artists will include Mollie Carter, Axel Ebring, Mick Henry, Charmian Johnson, Glenn Lewis, Santo Mignosa, Wayne Ngan and Laura Wee Láy Láq, among many others.

On the east side of the floor, Otani Workshop: Monsters in My Head offers visitors a look into the mind of one of Japan’s leading contemporary ceramic artists. Born in 1980 in Shigaraki—one of Japan’s oldest pottery centres—Shigeru Otani, known as Otani Workshop, is an important figure in Japanese ceramics. This visionary exhibition marks Otani’s first solo presentation in North America and retraces his artistic journey, providing insight into the mythical figures and contemporary imagery that have come to characterize his work. Featuring new paintings inspired by personal memories alongside hand-built ceramic sculptures in varying scales, the exhibition is a compelling introduction to Otani Workshop’s unique practice, which blends time-honoured Japanese artistic techniques with a bold, contemporary aesthetic.

Entrance into every exhibition is included in general admission for the public. From $58 annually, visitors can enjoy unlimited admission to all exhibitions with a Gallery Access Pass. Those who become Gallery Members join a community that celebrates creativity and supports access to art for everyone—Members enjoy unlimited exhibition entry, guest passes, and exclusive Members’ perks all year round.

Find out more.

For information on all current and ongoing exhibitions, visit vanartgallery.bc.ca/exhibitions-and-events.