Villa Charities presents On New Ground, a retrospective by Giuseppe Mercurio, curated by Francesca Valente.
On New Ground
Giuseppe Mercurio
Toronto Retrospective
Curated by
Francesca Valente
OPENING
Thursday, September 4 | 6:00PM
FREE EVENT | REGISTRATION REQUIRED
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE OPENING
EXHIBITION
September 5 to September 29, 2025
Monday to Friday
10AM to 5PM
FREE ADMISSION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
JOSEPH D. CARRIER ART GALLERY
Columbus Centre
901 Lawrence Avenue West | Toronto ON
The exhibition spans twenty years of work, featuring a rich selection of pieces created using various techniques and media. The result is a fascinating and unpredictable artistic journey, starting with black-and-white photographs that capture deep emotion and symbolism—particularly the hands of his mother kneading bread, a central figure in Mercurio’s life—and culminating in the bold colours and experimental techniques of his most recent acrylic canvases.
Presented by Villa Charities, under the Auspices of the Consulate General of Italy in Toronto and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto.
Official Festival Hub of 2025 Ontario Culture Days.
Through a corpus of over thirty works, the artist and curator invite the visitor to participate in an authentic path of discovery, experimentation, manipulation of space and perception.
What changes over time is not his creative and expressive solutions, but rather the very gaze that perceives them. A journey whose only prerequisite is the absolute freedom of expression, declined as the ability to evoke his beloved Calabria, emerging in the dreamlike traits of his landscapes without becoming a graphic imitation or reproduction.
Giuseppe Mercurio’s work has been recently included, in the context of the Imago Mundi Foundation, in Theorema 3. This international project, co-curated by Francesca Valente, was acclaimed by art critics as well as the public at the Gallerie delle Prigioni in Treviso, recently restored by architect Tobia Scarpa.
Giuseppe Mercurio studied economics and business at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) and then enrolled in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto to further research some aspects of contemporary Italian literature.