Hugo Canoilas
Hold your Breath
- Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
- 04.10.2025–07.02.2026
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 by gestures by the artist 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 and re-staging of this artwork at Oakville Galleries reflects Canoilas's practice of revising and recontextualizing large-scale works to adapt to the context and architecture of different exhibition spaces. In fact, from time to time on this large, gallery-filling work, we see the scars on the canvas revealing its operatic staging - markings from the actual production itself.
Text: Seamus Kealy
Hugo Canoilas, Hold your Breath, Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square, 2025