An ambitious new Modern and contemporary art museum is growing on the Canadian prairies. Remai Modern, which has been under construction since 2013, is due to open on 21 October in Saskatoon after a year’s delay. The museum, which is named after its leading patron, the local entrepreneur and philanthropist Ellen Remai, announced details of its opening exhibition today (27 June).
The 11,500 sq. m riverside building, designed by the Canadian architect Bruce Kuwabara, extends over four cantilevered floors reflecting the wide open spaces of the Saskatchewan region. Its size is “extraordinary for a small city”, says Gregory Burke, Remai Modern’s New Zealand-born director and chief executive, who previously led Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. The museum will charge admission and aims to attract around 220,000 visitors a year (the local population is 300,000). Originally budgeted at $71m, the final cost of construction is yet to be confirmed.
The museum has inherited the bulk of its 8,000-strong collection, including European Modernist and Canadian Group of Seven works, from Saskatoon’s now-defunct Mendel Art Gallery. The gallery was established in 1964 by the local authorities and Frederick Mendel, a meatpacking magnate and collector who had fled Nazi Germany. After a planned extension struggled to attract funding, the city council voted in 2009 to replace it with a new purpose-built gallery as part of a wider downtown regeneration scheme.
Burke hopes that the inaugural show, Field Guide, which he is co-organising with the chief curator Sandra Guimarães, formerly of the Serralves Museum in Portugal, will act as “a primer to introduce the programme’s direction”. Selected works from the collection will be interspersed with contemporary commissions by Canadian and international artists, including a live project evolving on-site by Thomas Hirschhorn and a collaboration between the Ontario-based indigenous artists Tanya Lukin-Linklater and Duane Linklater.
In line with the museum’s “artist-centred” ethos, Ryan Gander will turn curator to present one of the centrepieces of the collection: the world’s largest group of Picasso linocuts, donated by the Frank and Ellen Remai Foundation in 2012. They have inspired a new addition to Gander’s own installation, Fieldwork (2015), another gift from the Remai foundation. The rotating conveyor belt of cryptic objects, ranging from a damaged teddy bear to a kitchen sink, will now include a skewered stack of drawings reproducing all 406 Picasso prints, while the originals hang safely alongside.
After Field Guide, the museum will be the only Canadian venue for the first US retrospective dedicated to the Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham, organised by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and now at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Opening in spring 2018, the show marks Remai Modern’s commitment to become a centre for contemporary indigenous art.