This fall, Galerie de l’UQAM invites visitors to the highly-anticipated exhibition by UQAM alumnus David Altmejd. Work by this internationally renowned sculptor will be presented in Montreal for the first time in ten years. Curated by Louise Déry, Director of Galerie de l’UQAM, the exhibition David Altmejd. Agora unites almost thirty heads and busts, which are emblematic of the artist’s sculptural practice and were made between 1999 and 2025. Forming a remarkable assembly of mythological and real characters, spiritual and terrestrial figures, as well as human and non-human creatures, this body of work reveals the extent to which Altmejd brings about a metamorphosis of the living, induced by creative and unconscious forces, to construct a world.
For over thirty years, Altmejd’s work has developed in an organic, viral, and exhilarating manner. In the agora representing the concept of the exhibition, he displays independent busts and heads that seem linked by an unlikely genealogy, a filiation asking to be deciphered.
The sculptures were selected from almost 300 pieces made since the late 1990s. They represent different periods, styles, materials, and techniques and reveal Altmejd’s vision of how beings are born, gather, metamorphose, come apart, regenerate. This agora of figures in ancient or futuristic, archetypal or surrealist, amusing or provocative styles forms a rich hybridization of human and non-human. Through this work, Altmejd continues his exploration of identity, cloning, species mutation, as well as unconscious and creative energy. Influenced by the spirit and soul inspiring his subjects and by the hands and fingers shaping the materials, the sculptures demonstrate the range of a practice obsessed with the body and flesh, the skull and its cavities, the eye and its connections.
The exhibition also includes several drawings related to the artworks’ conceptual development, as well as a space envisioned as a work studio where visitors can learn about the various techniques, tools, and methods used to create the sculptures. Three bronze pieces complete the exhibition: Hand Bird I (2007), the first bronze Altmejd made for the Venice Biennale; Pixel (2025), his most recent one; and La charge (2016), an imposing figure recently acquired by the Collection d’œuvres d’art de l’UQAM with the support of the UQAM Foundation.
