Touted as Canada’s oldest and largest international art fair, Art Toronto is back at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre this year from October 26-29. Whether you just want to admire some work or are interested in starting—or expanding—your collection, this four-day event is a great way to visit galleries from coast to coast and get to know local artists. Here are our top picks on who to check out.

Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal)-Booth B11
Born in Toronto and based in London, U.K,. Shaan Syed’s pieces range from large scale abstract hard-edge paintings in contrasting colours to line drawn imagery of plants. He often adds materials to the paint such as sawdust and plaster to enhance the canvas surfaces.

Catriona Jeffries (Vancouver)-Booth A16
Brian Jungen, winner of the inaugural Sobey Art Award in 2002, is of Dane-zaa and Swiss ancestry. He currently lives in B.C’s Okanagan region and is known for repurposing sporting materials and sneakers into sculptures that references Indigenous West Coast art.

COOPER COLE (Toronto)-Booth C33
Maureen Gruben is an Inuvialuk artist who incorporates sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance into her work. Using found objects in ways that reflect the northern landscape in playful ways, Gruben’s work is acutely aware of the fragility between human consumption and its effects on nature.

Eli Kerr (Montreal)-Booth C13
Valérie Blass is a Montreal artist who is keenly attuned to manipulating materials and has a unique visionary ability to smash them together in new ways. Blass also has a great cheeky eye for the human body.

Galerie Nicolas Robert (Toronto, Montreal)-Booth B44, B50
Mel Arsenault lives in Montreal and specializes in ceramic sculpture. The natural world, science, and the building blocks of matter are all important to Arsenault’s artistic output. Beautifully glazed and playful, these sculptures make for low maintenance roommates.

TAP Art Space (Montreal)-booth B72
Toronto-based, New Brunswick-born Chantal Khoury is of Lebanese descent and her art engages with the country’s history, as well as her own personal archives. Figurative imagery emerges from swirls and washes of abstract colour.

The Blue Building (Halifax)-Booth C72
Kayza DeGraff-Ford is an Alberta-born visual artist who is currently living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. DeGraff-Ford mainly works in paint and mixed media, sewing raw canvas pieces with grommets. A loose colourful palette enlivens their pictorial worlds populated by frolicking animals, vegetation, and humans.

Wil Aballe Art Projects (Vancouver)-Booth C34
Karice Mitchell is a Toronto born artist who’s photo-based installations use found imagery that she digitally manipulates. According to Mitchell, her work “engages with issues relating to the representation of the Black female body in pornography and popular culture.”

Pangée (Montreal)-Booth C01
Montrealer Catherine Desroches’ drawings depict real, imagined and virtual experiences with pattern-like repeated elements. Desroches’ hand is delicate and their drawings are to be lovingly poured over.

Franz Kaka (Toronto)-Booth C42
Anne Low is a multi-disciplinary artist primarily working in sculpture, who was born in Ontario and currently lives on Denman Island, BC. Weaving and textiles are an important foundation for Low’s artistic practice. With exacting curation, Low brings out the inherent poetry in functional everyday objects.

Read more:
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