Hugo Canoilas: Hold Your Breath

Hugo Canoilas: Hold Your Breath - Exhibit

Date: October 4, 2025 to February 7, 2026

Location: Oakville Galleries, Centennial Square, 120 Navy Street, Oakville

Hold Your Breath is Hugo Canoilas’ first solo exhibition in Canada.

The exhibition presents an enormous, amorphous painting covering the entire Centennial Gallery space. Visitors are guided throughout this installation, encouraged to explore and walk over the artwork. The material, arrangement and mise en scene of Hold Your Breath was initially developed as an operatic set for Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Bregenzer Festspielhaus in Austria.

This new presentation at Oakville Galleries reflects Canoilas's practice of revising and recontextualizing large-scale works to adapt to and challenge the architecture of each exhibition space. Canoilas' immersive work features deep-sea imagery, including a microscopic view of an octopus's skin, a seashell, and a large siphonophore, symbolizing symbiosis and mutualism. The painting installation also uses ROV spotlights, contrasting the celestial light of historical painting with the pure white of modern art. Images emerge from the darkness through process-driven techniques that mimic nature.

More info here.