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About the Fair

Plural celebrates the best of contemporary art in Canada. Formerly known as the Papier Art Fair, Plural is organized by the Contemporary Art Galleries Association. The 2025 edition welcomed 44 exhibitors from 7 Canadian cities.

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VIP Programming

The artworks will be visible online to the public from April 11 to May 2, 2025.
For VIP ticket holders, access begins at noon on April 4. 


Come back on April 11 to access the artworks online!

The artworks will be visible online to the public from April 11 to May 2, 2025.
For VIP ticket holders, access begins at noon on April 4. 

The artworks will be visible to the public from April 11 to May 2, 2025.
For VIP ticket holders, access begins at noon on April 4.

Enjoy an exclusive preview of the artworks with your VIP account.

To log in, enter the 14 numbers of your VIP ID number on your ticket.  

Enjoy your visit!

Congratulations, your details have been forwarded to the exhibitor.

We can pass on your name and email address to the owners of this gallery so that they can contact you in the future. These communications will inform you of the latest works of the artists they represent and gallery events.

Do you like what you see?

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Plural VIP (10 of 12).jpg

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Plural VIP (6 of 12).jpg

Here are a few reasons why companies might be motivated to collect art: 

## Support for artists 
The purchase of works of art by Quebec companies represents a significant percentage of annual acquisition transactions in the province, in some years almost equalling that of museum institutions. In this way, companies help to diversify funding for the arts by multiplying sources, thereby providing artists with greater independence. 

Indeed, by creating an acquisition policy and drawing up broad guidelines, corporate collectors affirm their support for the art market and equip themselves with tools to foster their relationship with artists. By setting an average number of acquisitions per year or an amount allocated to art purchases each year, they help ensure the vitality of the artistic field and demonstrate their support for local creators.


## Preservation of cultural heritage 
Corporate collections also enrich our cultural heritage, through their support of local artists and the preservation of contemporary art. They contribute to the longevity of works by ensuring that they are exhibited and disseminated in private and sometimes public settings. By collecting contemporary works, companies help to ensure that our artistic heritage is preserved and brought to light over time. 

Moreover, while many companies keep their works for posterity, others - due to a large quantity and lack of space - will sometimes have to dispose of works to prevent them from piling up in storage. Many then decide to make donations to museums and benefit auctions, thus contributing to the preservation and prosperity of Canadian art history.


## Representation of identity and values
A collection represents the ensemble of works of art purchased by a company, and is distinguished by its originality from one business to the next. It grows, consolidates and expands with each new acquisition. The works that make up a collection reflect passionate and committed purchases. Far from being tied to a single, distinct function, art collections in organizations play several roles: they can serve both as decorative objects and as vehicles for corporate identity and values. 

There are as many types of collections as there are business models. Some companies buy works of art out of passion and keep them preciously in their offices. Others will proudly show them off to visitors and display them in common areas. Some companies use artworks as a promotional tool to enhance their brand image. Others will take it upon themselves to support local artists and build up a visual archive representative of our times.

Many companies have acquisition committees and specific collecting mandates to guide their purchases. Certain organizations also develop a detailed policy regarding the medium, technique, subject, or artistic period to ensure that the works reflect the business’s intrinsic values.


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## Benefits for employees

- Facilitates social interaction; 
- Elicits emotional responses; 
- Enhances relationships between employees; 
- Improves the work environment;
- Encourages learning about artwork.

Indeed, artworks newly installed in the workplace are likely to encourage social interaction between employees. Regardless of the nature of these discussions, they create a climate conducive to exchanges relating to the works of art. The presence of art in a professional environment can also increase employees' interest in them in a broader context. If an employee enjoys being near a work of art, they may seek out more information about the artist and their approach, or even visit a gallery or museum to admire other pieces.

These benefits can be increased through mediation and promotion to employees and the general public, such as lending works to museum exhibitions, publishing a catalog of works from the collection, offering guided tours open to all, and more. 


## Tax benefits 
Companies who collect benefit from considerable tax advantages through the Quebec government in terms of amortizing the purchase of works of art. 

For all artworks purchased and destined to be displayed in the workplace, and whose author is a Canadian resident or citizen at the time of creation, businesses can amortize 33.3% of the acquisition cost on a declining balance. The following media are eligible: prints, etchings,
drawings, paintings, or any similar artwork whose cost exceeds $200.

Companies can also benefit from significant tax breaks when making a donation to a museum. To understand all the financial advantages available to companies, and those that apply to each particular situation, please consult an accountant.


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To learn more, do not hesitate to ask questions to experts in the field, such as gallerists, who will be able to guide you towards more specific answers.


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## While strolling through the fair, you may notice acquisition indications next to certain artworks, mentioning that they have been purchased by a museum or a company, and are now part of their respective collections. 

## But have you ever wondered: *why do companies decide to buy works of art?* Though art is not necessarily part of their main mission, a collection can directly benefit a company as a whole. 



Why do businesses collect art?

### A Journal of Reflections on the Endless Imaginary

### The mill turns. It bears witness to the perpetual motion of thought and the transformation of matter. With its repetitive cycle, it generates a whirlwind of air and dust, a spiral of flour, an infinite flow of possibilities.

*Sarah, December 15, 2024*

Let’s assume that the human imagination has no known end, that it can never be exhausted, but rather multiplies infinitely, creating unique imaginary worlds. Each creator can, in this sense, establish their own rules and construct their own laws within a conceived space. Since the limits of time and space do not exist in the vortex imaginarium, artists can embrace the irrational and the impossible without physical or logical constraints.

Let us define imagination as a pure space of freedom, where the inconceivable and the fantastic coexist without barriers, beyond the laws of what has already been seen. This free space does not have to represent the world as it is perceived. Each individual is free to push the impulse of creation to infinity, just as our surrealist artist friends have done, blurring the boundaries between reality and myth.

One may then wonder if the artist creates an imaginary world structured by laws, cycles, series, and patterns, or if this world surpasses human thought itself. How can this imaginary realm exist beyond the mind that conceived it? Could it stretch infinitely, especially through an artwork destined to be viewed by different individuals, each capable of shaping their own imaginary interpretations? The resonance of artworks extends this initial imaginary world into a shared one, reinterpreted and absorbed by those who experience it.


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*Manon, December 20, 2024*

We understand that artists draw inspiration from their environment: they are moved by their concerns about the current state of the world, by suffering, by beauty, by their origins. They borrow symbols, codes, and iconographies from various eras and from their daily experiences. Combined with their imagination, their creations become part of an endless, metaphorical universe, a refuge uniquely their own, where they feel free from all constraints.

This universe is composed of contrasts that both oppose and attract one another, forming an immense array of tangible and intangible possibilities, blending materiality and immateriality, which underpin the very foundation of their artistic approach:


### The seen and the unseen
### The full and the empty
### Attraction and repulsion
### Fragility and roughness
### Dream and reality
### Balance and imbalance

The artist creates based on what they wish to convey to the spectator and/or viewing public. Their imaginary world is built from personal experiences (human evolution, history, science, motherhood, fear of the other, technological advancements, the construction of dreams, etc.), which they share with others. These experiences place both the artist and the audience at the heart of this imaginary world and the creative process itself. The entirety of these feelings, material and immaterial, visible and invisible, forms an unending succession of images, where time and space dissolve into infinity.

Discover *Et si les moulins tournaient sans jamais s’arrêter*, an emerging art exhibition collaboratively curated by Loto-Québec and Artch, at booth P05 on the 2nd floor of the fair's pavilion, from April 11 to 13.


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The artists:

**Kelly Davis** explores the mystical realm of the imaginable, where abundance and infinite expansion reign. Through her abstract paintings, she creates portals to an invisible yet deeply felt reality, offering a space for personal and collective resonance. Her work is part of an ongoing dialogue, activated by the viewer’s engagement and nourished by an intuitive exchange that transcends language.

**Gabor Bata** draws and paints characters from his imagination who constantly try, but inevitably fail, to communicate and connect. He creates vibrant, voluptuous scenes that captivate the eye, influenced by his love of cinema, animation, comics, and design.

**Alfred Muszynski** sees his work as research, “a network of ideas above all.” His pieces intertwine codes and iconographies from the past and present, playing with reality and myth like a puzzle. His work is a network of symbolic references, where each painting finds its place within the system he has constructed.

**Alex Pouliot** seeks to reclaim the magic of art by exploring the invisible forces that shape appearances and individual identity. Often in dialogue with specific locations, his work questions the influence of Western cultural supremacy in mass media and its role in constructing and colonizing collective imaginaries.

**Judith Berry (Loto-Québec Collection)**: “This small painting is one of my many attempts to condense the landscape into a surface that feels manipulable. The winding spiral paths evoke an imposing form, similar to a hill. Yet, the painted surface remains opaque, with each gesture inscribed directly onto it. The image suggests vast expanses while taking on the appearance of a tangible object or a body fragment. This piece is part of a decades-long exploration aimed at blending the genres of landscape, still life, and portraiture. I confront the notion of landscape, our relationship to the environment, and the ways in which its transformations affect us.”

**Mélanie Dumas** explores materiality by engaging with space, fullness, and emptiness to reveal new geometries. Her work examines the concept of landscape through forms inspired by the living and synthetic structures that compose it. Balancing fragility and robustness, stillness and movement, she selects raw materials to highlight their properties and temporality. By incorporating active systems, she creates sculptures that reproduce natural phenomena on a small scale, questioning our relationship with the Anthropocene.

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By Manon Pouliot, Head of the Loto-Québec Collection, and Sarah Kitzy Gineau Delyon, Director of artch

Loto-Québec x artch : Et si les moulins tournaient sans ne jamais s’arrêter

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It all started with an ink drawing of four chickens originally attributed to Emily Carr that Tam came across in 2017 during her research on Chinese Canadian artist Lee Chao Nam 李趙南 at the BC Archives. But Lee was a friend of Carr, and Tam says it is possible that Lee taught Carr traditional Chinese brushwork to achieve the style in this sketch. While chickens have long been considered popular subject matter in Chinese ink painting, roosters are also a ubiquitous motif in Chinese porcelain dishware designs from Southern China and Hong Kong to Southeast Asia and their diasporas. Multiplied in inky form, they instantly appeal to young and old, like festival banners celebrating the humble yet magnificent bird.


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Restaged in part for Plural 2025, Tam has made a smaller selection of bird drawings including those crowd-sourced from the Richmond Art Gallery (2017) iteration of her exhibition in which visitors produced hundreds of drawings in a community event. As in earlier installments, a flock of these drawings fly overhead like the feathered friends they depict, big swags of papers that swoop across the ceiling. Tam’s exhibition offers a different perspective on art of the Chinese diaspora—literally and figuratively—as their display method is more about how the drawings flutter collectively to comprise the installation rather than fixate on fine details of each bird. The poetry of this work is such that one drawing cannot hang without the other; each must be in company of and shown as a group.

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I have always considered Tam to be an artist who moonlighted as art historical detective, mining the annals of Canadian art history for who and what has not been seen, surfacing histories lost and forgotten. Each project feels like a deep-sea diving expedition into art historical, archival and community records which Tam then materializes into an exhibition within an exhibition. Through meticulously staged installations, she presents a speculative art history for the viewer, stepping into a time machine to imagine what life was like for Chinese newcomers, or in the case of Lee, what his life might have looked like. In all of this, embedded in Tam’s deeply rooted and intertwined research practice as art is the story of Chinese immigration in Canada and the continued struggle for visibility and belonging both inside and outside of the art world. These histories, while constantly unfurling over land and time, are only just beginning.


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by Charlene K. Lau 劉雪铃

*The National Bank is proud to present Like rain drops rolling down new paint, an installation by Karen Tam, in the Espace Banque Nationale in the Grand Quay's of Port of Montreal's Terminal.*

## On a sunny March Sunday morning, I chat with Karen Tam on Google Meet. Cracking open the exhibition catalogue *With wings like clouds hung from the sky 大鵬就振翼* (2017), it fans out across my lap, opening to a photo of a bird’s eye view of the exact installation we are about to discuss. For this, Tam hung hundreds of sketches of birds—300 of which were drawn by the artist, her mother Yin Law 譚阮嫣娜, and the elder Tam’s painting teacher, Lui Luk Chun 呂陸川—across the ceiling of Richmond Art Gallery.



Exhibitors

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From the blog

Why do businesses collect art?

Loto-Québec x artch : Et si les moulins tournaient sans ne jamais s’arrêter

Karen Tam: Birds of a Feather