Join à la Carte Kitchen Inc. at the Gardiner Bistro for lunch from Sunday to Friday in the third-floor Terrace Room with stunning views overlooking the city.
For the past thirty-five years, acclaimed Canadian artist Steven Heinemann has transformed the medium of ceramics in Canada. This timely retrospective featuring more than 70 objects examines Heinemann’s fascinating and evolving process. Opens October 19!
Celebrate 25 years of Empty Bowls at the Gardiner! Sample delicious soups by some of the city's top chefs and choose a ceramic bowl to take home with you, all in support of Anishnawbe Health Toronto's work to aid the homeless.
The Gardiner Museum is among the few museums in the world focused on ceramics, and is one of the most important specialty museums internationally. It houses approximately 4,000 objects, including European porcelain, ceramics from the Ancient Americas, Chinese porcelain, Japanese porcelain, and contemporary ceramics. Search the collection online!
Everyone can love clay! Become a Friend at one of the world’s great specialty museums and enjoy the benefits, including unlimited admission, invitations to exhibition previews and special events, discounts on lectures and clay classes, and more.
Encompassing works by leading figures in the history of ceramics, the Gardiner Museum’s modern and contemporary collection shows the remarkable breadth of styles and approaches from the postwar period to the present day. Holdings illustrate the continued endurance of studio pottery alongside works exemplifying movements that sought to release the medium of clay from its functional imperative, from abstract expressionism of the late 1950s to the conceptual and post-modern approaches of the 1980s and 90s. Modern and contemporary works equally demonstrate the importance of clay as a medium of sculptural expression.
The field of ceramics today is rich and varied. The current generation of ceramists takes the medium in multiple directions. In their work they show consciousness of history and popular culture, use the medium to tell stories, and borrow from industrial techniques such as transfer-printing and mould making. Ceramics are also used in the conception of multimedia work.
The Gardiner Museum’s collection of modern and contemporary ceramics includes works by Canadian, American, and international artists and has become a major focus of collecting.
Explore Modern and Contemporary Ceramics
1. Hans Coper (1920-1981), Untitled Jug (detail), c.1953, Gift of Christine and Claude Bissell, G03.2.1
2. Adrian Saxe (b.1943), D'Nile (detail), C.2004, Gift of Helen Gardiner and Frank Lloyd, G05.8.1a-c
3. Greg Payce (b.1956), Apparently (detail), c.1999, Purchased with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program, G04.19.1; Gift of the Artist, G05.13.1. Photographer: Toni Hafkenscheid
4. Gertraud Möhwald (1929-2002), Head with a Dim of Hair (detail), 2002, Gif of Alan Mandell, G14.6.1a-b