6 Montreal-based Artists to follow in 2026

6 Montreal-based Artists to Follow in 2026

Montréal has always been a city that creates almost instinctively. But in 2026, there’s a particular energy in the air, studios feel restless, ideas circulate faster, and galleries are opening themselves to voices that quietly but decisively reshape how contemporary Canadian art is experienced.

This year, we turn our attention to six Montréal-based artists to watch in 2026. Artists whose practices are rooted in material sensitivity, cultural awareness, and a subtle sense of risk. Their work doesn’t seek spectacle; it unfolds with intention, revealing depth through gesture, process, and presence.

Together, they embody Montréal’s artistic tempo, intimate yet ambitious, reflective yet forward-moving. A scene where poetry meets experimentation, and where innovation happens not in excess, but in nuance.

Chloé Sabourin

Chloé Sabourin is a visual artist based in Montreal. Working primarily on large-scale canvases with acrylic paint and oil sticks, she portrays nature as a metaphor for life, its cycles, its capacity to adapt, and its instinct to withdraw when conditions no longer nurture growth. Through her interplay of technique and color, Chloé captures the emotion of the present moment, inviting introspection, calm, and a gentle pause within an otherwise fast-paced world.

Image courtesy of Villedepluie.

ARTIST WEBSITE

Audrey St-Laurent

Audrey St-Laurent is a Montréal artist whose practice spans photography, video, sculpture, and new media. A graduate of UQAM’s Visual and Media Arts program, she explores the intersection of technology, materiality, and the environment. Her passion for the vegetal world led her to study floristry and launch her own studio in 2014, creating botanical installations for events and film.

Image courtesy of the artist.

ARTIST WEBSITE

Aidan Matthews

Aidan Matthews’ work is rooted in his photographic instincts. His images are un-staged, created in reaction to light, colours, and gestures. His compositions forego formal conventions in favour of a graphic approach to imagemaking. His subjects — friends, strangers, objects, and places—are monumentalized by his camera.

Matthews’ reverence for his subjects pushes his images beyond the diary into a realm of visual expression that transforms his subjects to relics of time, emotion, and movement.

Image courtesy of Pat Ozols.

ARTIST WEBSITE

Rosalie Gamache

Rosalie Gamache, a Montréal-based artist born in 1993, reinterprets the classical nude through a contemporary queer lens. Her recent oil paintings dissolve the body into translucent, dreamlike forms, where identity becomes fluid and vulnerability takes centre stage. Trained in both academic traditions and historical techniques—from Université Laval to the Florence Classical Art Academy—Gamache brings rare technical mastery to deeply intimate work.

She has exhibited widely across Canada and Europe, received multiple national and provincial grants, and has shown at major fairs including Papier/Plural, Art Toronto, and Future Fair in New York.

Image courtesy of Martin Laroche.

ARTIST WEBSITE

Louise Campion

French artist and writer Louise Campion splits her time between Montréal, Glasgow, and Paris, shaping a practice that moves fluidly between painting, writing, and curation. A graduate of Concordia University and the Glasgow School of Art—both with distinction—she was awarded the Ranald and Jennifer May Scholarship for her MFA.

Her work has travelled internationally, with recent exhibitions at The Untitled Space in New York, The Glue Factory in Glasgow, and ICAT at HFBK Hamburg. Beyond the studio, Campion’s voice extends to ISSAY magazine and exhibition texts for Céline Bureau, while her curatorial projects have activated spaces like the Pipe Factory, Haberdashery, and the New Glasgow Society.

She currently works with the non-profit Fais-moi l’art and the Visual Arts Centre, all while developing a new series of oil paintings for Hermès.

Image courtesy of the artist.

ARTIST WEBSITE

Antoine Lussier

Antoine Lussier pushes at the edges of what can be seen—and what can’t—through a practice rooted in the materiality of images. Working directly in-camera, he treats found objects, bodies, accidents, and manual interventions as active collaborators. Fragmentation, repetition, and distortion become ways to let the body appear, disappear, and reappear, generating images that feel both tactile and intimate. Blending photography, drawing, and installation, Lussier builds a visual language where the image becomes a body, and the body becomes an imprint.

Image courtesy of the artist.

ARTIST WEBSITE