Art Toronto 2026 Photodiary
I went to Art Toronto last weekend! It is, according to their website, the largest Canadian art fair. Here's what it is: all the snooty galleries in town plus some from far away set up booths at the giant convention centre for a single weekend, but the booths are so little they can only bring like, 6 artworks with them. (The fanciest galleries can afford two or three cubicles, but there were only a handful of those.)
I have never been to an art fair before, and I thought it could be fun to go and people watch, if nothing else.
Well, the art was so banger I barely did any peoplewatching.1 My theory of why the art was so good is that the incentives are pretty aligned for that! There are over a hundred booths. The booths compete to draw people in, demonstrate to the collectors the vibe of the gallery in question (some specialize in certain mediums, some specialize in certain aesthetics, some specialize in certain demographic groups), and probably ideally sell some art? So everyone brought their showstoppers.
At an art museum, by comparison, I imagine that one is working within a larger set of constraints: what pleases the donors and the board, what is high status to own, what fits with the rest of the collection, what are good for historical context, what fills in the gaps in a collection, what's plain-old sophisticated. Here, it was just a lot of crass classy commercialism. Two cheers for crass classy commercialism.
The vibes were good! It was lively but chill, and there were stations everywhere where you can buy drinks tickets for little glasses of rosΓ©. The hallways were wide and there was always some seating available. As someone who attended without any intent to buy art, I didn't feel out of place at all.
Price-wise, most of the pieces at the fair went for between 3-8k (cad), though there was a generous portion of works that were cheaper than that, and of course a long tail upwards.
Sometimes a featured artist will be in attendance and you would be saying to your friends "what the fuck this piece is so good" and that artist will just be like "aw thanks I made itβΊοΈ" from behind you, so watch out for that.
My friends and I took the first few hours to wander by ourselves, with the side mission of choosing our top 3 favourites from the exhibition. And then in the last half hour we did an all stars tour. And then it turned out that some of us drank hater juice and those people also had least favourites to show and that was fun too.
I will absolutely be back next year, and I will consider giving myself a little budget. I didn't bother doing that this year because I assumed that the art was going to be much more expensive.
The rest of this post is just going to be a slideshow with commentary. The slideshow is going to feature art I liked, detail work that I think is worth highlighting, and art that's good fodder for my secret mission at the art fair.
The secret mission, as it always is when I go look at modern art, is to weaponize the "my 5-year-old can make this" nature of certain pieces to get Cool Big Art for my house without paying Big Money. Via shameless, flagrant plagiarism. What are they going to do, make you delete your photos? Call the cops to seize your bootleg Klein? Ban you from Michael's?
Some Good Art at Art Toronto (2026)
Bloody Mary (Jessica Korderas, 2025). A magical little resin art piece.
Travel / Bikes and Business (Sara Caracristi). High contrast shadows my beloved.
November (Hummingbird), (Landon Mackenzie, 2024-25). Such colour!
Robson Park (Ben Reeves, 2026). I love the cheerful, acid green.
Night Tennis (Ben Reeves, 2026). Really nice colours throughout, and there's such interesting texture on the back wall - the pebbles, the metal part that's rusting at the bottom.
His eyes are open wide, let in the midnight sky, as they drove on (Jack Bishop, 2026). I love the surreal colour of this piece. Also the utter simplicity with which the little stick figure guys were drawn made me laugh.
me when im so good at colours ive ascended the need to be good at shapes B)
Ambrosia (Wendy Birmingham). Reminds me of the work of Jennifer L. Mohr, another artist I really like. Looking at plants on hikes can often be an almost psychedelic experience for me; all the little details that you slowly pick up. I like how this piece conveys that kind of intensity. The colours are very saturated, but also sort of very normal looking.
I think this is a piece by Julia Monson? It slaps, I love the saturated computer colours paired with the classical themes. Unfortunately I failed to take a picture of the placard for this one! I went and checked out her website and all her interiors are so dreamy.
SO LONG 888, BE KIND, MAKE ART (Brandon Steen, 2026). This is an area very close to my house lol. I saw this piece out of the corner of my eye and I was like "hey I know her". Asked the roomies to go thirdsies on it but they unfortunately declined :^(
Lake Huron, Looking West (Michelle Paterok, 2026). Tranquil and bright and glimmery. In person it looks more teal than lavender.
2 pieces by Gregorio Cuartas. The subtle gradients were so pleasing to look at.
The End (Kyle Scheurmann). Very vivid. Lots of lore tm that you can find on google so I won't repeat it here.
Galaxy (Nicolas Baier, 2026).
...I earnestly adore this composite photo. The gleaming lights of the city, the shadows of the clouds, the dramatic astrophotography..... its so 2012 r/hfy atheismcore.
Neramin / Spells (Brandon Dalmer, 2025). O-oh yeah I guess this can be art too. Why not. Actually, Dalmer's artwork is really cool, I think he's the artist whose works I took the most photos of. Here's a 2026 work, Buck Lake:
and another, Skynet:
The curious thing is that if you get real close to them, you'll notice these little codes inside each particular square of colour.
I wonder how he got them there with such uniformity! Maybe a laser cutter? Then afterwards I imagine it was a lot of painstaking colour mixing and then dabbing the colours on. I'd love to do something similar. I'm thinking I get a bunch of like, 8x8 panels and bring them to the makerspace to print guide codes on. Then I invite some friends over and give them a colour key and all the art supplies and just have them go at it. The end result would be something where each panel is actually a little different from the next, but hopefully the end result is still pretty cohesive :)
Smile of a River (Janna Watson, detail). Like milky rings of Saturn on a super dramatic backdrop. The number of individual stripes was mesmerizing.
This fucking piece, man. I saw it out of the corner of my eye and was like "oh shit, new artist that is like Roy Lichtenstein but actually good!?"
It was Roy Lichtenstein himself. Cubist Cello, 1997/98. π©
Databells (Rich Loen). On the ground floor of the convention centre they had an art installation, and it was beautiful. There were three or four curving tables, each with an assortment of collected and crowdsourced bells, ninety-nine in all. Rich Loen, who was an engineer before he became an artist, fitted each bell with a customized striking mechanism, a little computer, and an e-ink screen. The bells ring in accordance to statistical datasets - cancer deaths, bus rides, doughnuts eaten. Then, an algorithm makes the rings harmonize, so that the end result was more symphonic than cacophonous. You can listen to it below.
Anyways, that is a small fraction of the 170 photos and videos I took of good art at the fair. I hope you enjoyed!
The one note I had on the people was that there was a surprising number of women (like, maybe in the 5% range?) in heels. I did see many cool outfits.↩