A friend recently asked if I thought 2025 was a good year for art in Toronto. “Well,” I started with a sigh, before offering an entirely avoidant answer.
I really did not know the answer to that question. There was good art and bad art and a distressing amount of art that was, fatally, just fine. I noticed certain trends: more painters interested in the idiom of classical abstract expressionism, for one.
There were heated, panicked debates about AI (with surprisingly few interesting artistic responses to it!). A couple of galleries opened; new artists began to show.
As I look back on 2025 in its last weeks, what comes into focus is that, despite everything, the arts scene in Toronto remains vibrant and that, in itself, makes it a good year. Here are three highlights of 2025.
Everything and Nothing: Kelly Mark
The Toronto-based conceptual artist Kelly Mark, who died in February 2025, worked across performance, installation, drawing and sound, among other media. Her work dealt with the rigorous repetition of everyday life; in her piece “I really should …” (2002), Mark listed a thousand things she meant to do. She reflected back to us a vision of contemporary human life as a series of terrifyingly banal routines, but she located in them room for playfulness, experimentation and creation. The aptly titled “Everything and Nothing,” a multi-site survey of her work hosted by Olga Korper Gallery, was a highlight of the year.
Ways of Being: Art Manzil
In June, I saw “Ways of Being,” a group show featuring eight South Asian figurative artists expertly curated by Niyash Mistry. The work seemed interested in the problems and possibilities of nostalgia, whether it be personal or cultural. Ahsan Memon’s “Sameen” (2025) rendered a woman’s skin with a nearly jaundiced pallidness, setting her against a hazy background into which she seems to recede. Fatima Kaleem used coloured pencils and charcoal on canvas to create gorgeously saturated drawings of families. In the singular, stunning work collected here, each artist invoked both classical and modernist styles to probe how the very forms of art can reproduce a longing for the past.
Young Artists
Some of the best work I saw in 2025 was by artists in their early 20s — most of them either current students or recent graduates of OCAD University. They include Jake Santos, Jacob Jiayi Zhang, Ben Crombien, Lily Kapler, Dylan Dae-Shin, Isabelle Kuzio, Connor Rothe and Patrick Etherington. Their paintings, sculptures, and installations are loosely bound by a moody emphasis on atmosphere and by a critical reflection on their relation to art history. I look forward to seeing how they develop in 2026 and beyond.
