OTTAWA.- From December 12, 2025, to October 25, 2026, the National Gallery of Canada presents Sylvia Safdie: TERRA, an exhibition celebrating the five-decade career of the internationally renowned Montreal-based artist.

Premiering some new works, Sylvia Safdie: TERRA highlights Safdie’s key paintings, large-scale sculptures, as well as a selection of her experimental videos. A total of 19 works created between 1977 and 2025 are on display including two of her videos Luna No. 1 and Luna No. 2, created in 2024.

“We are thrilled to present this long-overdue exhibition dedicated to Sylvia Safdie at the Gallery,” said Jean-François Bélisle, Director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada. “A pioneering sculptor, Sylvia Safdie also belongs to a generation of early video women artists in Canada, an aspect of her practice often overlooked. Her works are very contemplative. She blends nature’s raw materials in surprising ways, giving them powerful symbolic, humanlike, and transformative meanings.”

Curated by Stephanie Burdzy, Assistant Curator, Contemporary art at the NGC, the exhibition is titled TERRA, the Latin word for earth. Of all the materials she uses, earth is the most primal and enduring material in her artistic palette. The natural world has been a refuge and a source of inspiration for the artist since her earliest memories. Over a lifetime spent gathering and collecting materials, organic and human-made, Safdie has uncovered dialogues between people and their environments, leading her to reflect on the relationship between nature and culture.

The works on view reveal Safdie’s continuing fascination with the material and ephemeral aspects of life on Earth, our shared home, in a subtle and captivating way. Her paintings and sculptures are frequently created into series spanning years, even decades, allowing meaning to emerge in each new context as she retools and changes existing compositions into new configurations. Her paintings and head-like sculptures appear to be abstract compositions, but as you approach them, you can see subtle human and figurative forms emerging from the surface.

A glimpse of the exhibition

Started 1986 and completed in 2025, Assemblages II is an installation made of natural materials alongside their cast or sculpted counterparts presented in a large shelving unit. Transported from their original contexts and reassembled into a pictorial inventory, these elements take on new associations as Safdie reimagines them in various sculptural media, such as bronze, glass, cement, and steel.

Earth II (1977–2025), another key installation on display in the exhibition, comprises 500 unique earth samples sourced by Safdie, with contributions from her friends and family members. Over 48 years, small piles of earth and sand have formed a deeply personal archive of the artist’s life, memories and relationships. For Safdie, the soils are marked by their individual origins, colours and textures. “The samples of earth do not speak of boundaries and divisions but of earth, the material that binds us. Each is unique; each is part of the whole,” she explained.

Developed between 2002 and 2020, her large-scale paintings Earth Marks Series XVIII, No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4 and No. 5, are made of linseed oil mixed with raw pigments sourced from Safdie’s collection. Literally of the earth, this material is a potent metaphor for transformation within the image-making process. With their soaring scale and meandering forms, the paintings propose an open-ended nomadic journey.