5 Montreal Art Exhibitions & Vernissages to See This Week: September 24–27, 2026
Looking for the best Montreal art exhibitions this week? From a monumental Chiharu Shiota installation at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to contemporary painting, Afrofuturism and experimental art, the city has plenty worth stepping inside for from September 24–27, 2026.
This week’s Best Kept MTL Top 5 moves between major museums, independent galleries and neighbourhood cultural spaces. Some are opening this weekend; others are exhibitions worth catching while you’re already out exploring Montréal.
Here are five Montreal art exhibitions and vernissages to have on your radar this week.
1. Chiharu Shiota — The Soul Trembles
📅 September 26, 2026 – February 14, 2027
📍 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts — 1380 Sherbrooke Street West | Google Maps
🎟️ Official exhibition page
If there is one Montreal art exhibition opening this week with serious destination status, this is it.
Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota brings The Soul Trembles to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts beginning September 26. The museum describes it as the largest exhibition ever devoted to the Berlin-based artist, encompassing more than 30 years of her practice.
Shiota is internationally known for monumental installations constructed from dense webs of thread. Objects, space and thousands of intersecting lines become haunting explorations of memory, absence, human connection and existence.
The Montréal presentation includes major installations such as Uncertain Journey, alongside sculpture, drawings, photography, video and archival material.
✨ Why go? This isn’t simply an exhibition you stand in front of. Shiota builds environments you physically enter — and this should be one of Montréal’s major visual-art events of the fall.
2. Jeanie Riddle — This World of Shapes
📅 Vernissage: Thursday, September 24, 6–9 PM
📍 Livart — 3980 Saint-Denis Street | Google Maps
🎟️ Official Livart exhibition page
What makes somewhere feel like home?
Canadian artist Jeanie Riddle, now based in Mexico, explores that deceptively complicated question through painting, sculpture, installation and found objects at Livart.
Furniture, domestic objects and images are selected, transformed and reassembled as Riddle turns the gallery into an immersive environment. The exhibition plays with the boundaries between intimate and formal spaces while exploring domestic codes, decoration and material memory.
This World of Shapes is also part of the third edition of Pictura Montréal, the citywide triennial dedicated to contemporary painting.
✨ Why go? A strong Thursday-night Montreal vernissage for anyone who likes contemporary art that changes how you experience the room around you.
3. Benz Debrosse — Surcharge
📅 Festive vernissage: Saturday, September 26, 1–5 PM
📍 Maison de la culture Maisonneuve — 4200 Ontario Street East | Google Maps
🎟️ Free | Official City of Montréal event page
Haitian-born, Québec-based multidisciplinary artist Benz Debrosse turns sensory overload into artistic material with Surcharge.
The exhibition moves through sculpture, assemblage, recovered objects and installation inside a maximalist, Afrofuturist universe informed by Debrosse’s experience of neurodivergence. Technology, cultural heritage and imagination collide as the artist explores what we reveal, conceal and transform.
Saturday’s vernissage adds a DJ, music, bites and surprises, making this one of the week’s more social art outings.
✨ Why go? For colour, texture and unapologetic visual density — with a Saturday-afternoon vernissage that feels more like a cultural gathering than a quiet gallery stop.
4. Jeune photographie montréalaise meets Art POP
📅 Friday, September 25
📍 POP Montréal / Rialto district
With POP Montréal taking over the city this weekend, visual art gets its own place in the festival ecosystem through Art POP.
One of the week’s more local discoveries comes through Project LOVE’s the light between the trees, a photography project developed by young photographers following a summer residency on Mount Royal.
Rather than treating the mountain as another Montréal postcard, the project focuses attention on observation — trails, wildlife, changing light and the small details people routinely walk past.
It’s an interesting counterweight to a weekend dominated by amplified music and crowded venues: art created by slowing down and actually looking at the city.
✨ Why go? For emerging Montréal photography with an unmistakably local subject — and an easy way to add visual art to a POP Montréal weekend.
5. Construction / Conduction — LAB-545
📅 Final weekend: through September 27
📍 Ateliers Belleville / LAB-545 — 545 Legendre Street West | Google Maps
Our final pick pushes beyond the conventional gallery experience.
Construction / Conduction brings artists together around electricity, electronics, sound, sculpture and experimentation, treating electronic components as artistic material rather than invisible technology.
Circuits, electromagnetic phenomena, reclaimed materials and sound become ways of questioning our relationships with technology, knowledge, ecology and the objects surrounding us.
More importantly for this week’s guide, September 27 is your last chance to catch it.
✨ Why go? Because contemporary art doesn’t have to mean paintings hanging on white walls. This is Montréal’s experimental side playing with the circuitry underneath modern life.
More Montreal art to have on your radar
Five picks inevitably means leaving something out.
This week, I’d also keep Kael Mercader’s Eau trouble, eau quand même at Arcade on the list. It opens September 24 as part of Pictura Montréal, making it another worthwhile stop for anyone specifically interested in contemporary painting.
And that’s exactly what makes searching for art exhibitions in Montreal this weekend interesting: there isn’t one art district or institution that tells the whole story.
You can start with an internationally renowned artist at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, move into an independent Plateau gallery, head east for Afrofuturism and finish somewhere experimenting with electronics and sound. That’s the route we want this weekly Best Kept MTL Top 5 to uncover.
And if you’re craving one more dose of visual culture, step inside World Press Photo Montréal 2026 for a powerful reality check through the year’s most unforgettable images. Discover World Press Photo Montréal 2026
