Auction Les Printemps du MAC 2025
Discover the auction artwork and artists
The Printemps du MAC auction has been rethought to emphasize support for emerging artists. This year, six emerging artists – Sierra Barber, Gabor Bata, Rémi Belliveau, Colin Canary, Marie-Danielle Duval and Clara Lacasse – were selected by a panel of experts to benefit from a unique mentoring program. Accompanied by established Montreal artist Yann Pocreau, who will mentor them throughout the adventure, they will have the opportunity to refine their artistic approach and explore the world of collecting.
The Printemps du MAC auction offers you the chance to bid on the works of these six emerging artists and their mentor! By bidding at this auction, you are concretely supporting the next generation of artists, since all the funds raised will be donated to the emerging artists.
The initiative will culminate in the Printemps du MAC evening, where guests will be able to discover the works and chat with the artists and their mentors.
The auction is open to all, whether or not you attend the event. Bidding begins on April 1, 2025, and closes at midnight on the evening of Printemps du MAC.
The link to the platform will be added to this page on April 1 at 9 a.m.
Emergent artists
SIERRA BARBER
storytellerstoryteller
2025
Vintage and contemporary glass beads on velvet
40,6 x 50,8 x 4 cm
Value $5,000
Sierra Barber’s paintings balance the experiences of her identity by combining Haudenosaunee imagery, oil and beadwork. This dialogue between tradition and colonial heritage allows her to reinterpret personal stories. Beads, old and new, bring their own memory and testify to cultural resilience. Her works, marked by recurring motifs and saturated colors, reflect the coexistence of multiple histories. Recently, she has adapted her beadwork into jewelry, each beaded flower carrying a meaning and becoming part of a larger continuity.
Sierra Barber, an Upper Mohawk and European Métis artist, is originally from Port Dover, Ontario, and resides on Six Nations Territory. A graduate of OCAD University in sculpture and aboriginal visual culture, she is currently pursuing a master’s degree in painting and drawing at Concordia. Her work has been exhibited at the Woodland Cultural Centre in New Zealand and at the Biennale of Contemporary Aboriginal Art. Her recent solo exhibition, Sky Flowers, was held at Galerie She:kon.
GABOR BATA
The FieldThe Field
2024
Oil pastel on gesso paper
144,7 x 100,3 cm
Value $4,200
Gabor Bata is a Montreal-based artist. He is influenced by his experience and love of film, animation, comics and design. He is the recipient of several fellowships, including the Dale and Nick Tedeschi Studio Arts Fellowship in 2020 and the ARTCH Festival Fellowship in 2022. In 2023, Bata completed an MFA in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University, and followed this up in November with his first solo show at Livart in Montreal.
RÉMI BELLIVEAU
Mid to late 60sMid to late 60s
2021
Stonehenge silkscreen
76,2 x 55,8 cm
value $1,500
Rémi Belliveau is an interdisciplinary Acadian artist, musician and author from Belliveau-Village (Memramcook Valley, New Brunswick), an Acadian hamlet located on Mi’kma’ki, the unceded ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq people. His artistic work focuses on deconstructing and reprogramming the foundations, structures and imaginaries of the Acadian culture to which he belongs, with the aim of cultivating capacities for (self-)analysis and critical thinking.
Recently, he was twice nominated for the Sobey Arts Award (Atlantic finalist in 2021, Atlantic preliminary list in 2024), winner of the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Award (2022), winner of the MOMENTA X RBC program (2023), winner of the Ateliers Montréalais de la Fonderie Darling (2023-2026), winner of the Periculum grant for discourse on art (2024) and finalist for the Prix en art actuel du Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (2025).
COLIN CANARY
And Now I’m Sitting Here Alone Talking to a GhostAnd Now I’m Sitting Here Alone Talking to a Ghost
2024
Transfer of toner, ink, spray paint and acrylic onto panel
45,7 x 60,9 cm
Value $2,500
Imagine a poem found in the street, partly erased, partly illegible. Images fade from your memory, leaving only a silhouette, a fragile echo. This is how Colin Canary sees his paintings: erased fragments where a narrative remains to be recomposed. Blurred figures, frozen flowers and decomposed limbs float in a space between plastic and prose. His work explores the erosion of memories, the familiarity of the unknown and interior landscapes shaped by time, regrets and dreams.
Born in Halifax, Colin Canary is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and recently completed an MFA at Concordia, where he was awarded the Lilian Vineberg and Tom Hopkins prizes. His work has been shown at Concordia’s MFA Gallery, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Art Mûr and Ottawa’s Karsh-Masson Gallery. He lives and works in Montreal.
MARIE-DANIELLE DUVAL
Deux tigres pesantsDeux tigres pesants
2024
63,5 x 88,5 cm
Value $1,500
This drawing, inspired by a chimerical experience, presents a dissociated scene where darkness and distortion blur the narrative. Like a reflection in the water, the shapes merge, accentuating the distance from the event depicted. Fauvist colors dominate the composition, relegating the human figure to the background, softening the violence while sublimating it. This dreamlike vision questions the boundary between fiction and reality, as well as the malleability of individual and collective memory.
Marie-Danielle Duval, a Senegalese-Quebec artist based in Montreal, studied visual arts at UQAM and Concordia. She has exhibited in Montreal, New York and in 2024 at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Galerie McClure and Maison de la culture Marie Uguay. Winner of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and the FRQSC, her work is included in several collections. Her work explores the power of narratives and, through an autofictive approach to portraiture, sheds light on marginalized voices.
CLARA LACASSE
SchistesSchistes
2021
Chromogenic print
Artist’s proof
81,2 x 101,6 cm
Value $2,120
Schistes is part of a body of photographs produced during the renovation of the Montreal Biodome. This critical and poetic project questions the symbolism of the Biodôme, a place where the current ecological drama is re-enacted. Through the (de)construction of reconstituted ecosystems, the series proposes a speculative narrative on the memory of the living and our ecological conscience.
Clara Lacasse is a photographer and visual artist whose work explores narratives linked to history, nature and the collective imagination. Winner of the Prix Nouvelle génération de photographes (2022), she has exhibited at VU Photo, DRAC, the National Gallery of Canada, Arsenal Toronto and Centre Skol.
Portrait Clara Lacasse / Credit: Maya Naidu
Mentor artist
YANN POCREAU
Lumière 02Lumière 02
2015
100,9 x 68,8 cm
édition 2/5
Épreuve numérique sur Ilford Smooth Pearl
Valeur 7 200 $
Yann Pocreau est né à Québec en 1980. Dans ses recherches récentes, à travers différents types de médiums dont la photographie, la sculpture et l’installation, il s’intéresse à la lumière comme sujet vivant et à l’effet de celle-ci sur la trame narrative des images. Il a participé à plusieurs expositions canadiennes, américaines et européennes dont aux Rencontres photographiques d’Arles, au Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal et au Image Centre de Toronto.
Son travail a été commenté dans divers magazines et ses œuvres sont présentes dans de nombreuses collections dont celles de la Banque Nationale du Canada, d’Hydro-Québec, de Desjardins, de la Ville de Montréal, du Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, du Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, du Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, du Musée d’art de Joliette et de la Galerie de l’UQAM. Il est le lauréat du Prix Louis-Comtois 2024. Il est représenté par la galerie Blouin Division à Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal où il vit et travaille.
Auction Presenter
