Snow once again blankets the city on 6 March 2025 and Galerie Eli Kerr, the modest-sized exhibition space on St. Laurent Boulevard, is crammed to capacity with visitors.
So much so that it is practically impossible to get a good look at the artworks presented at the show, simply entitled Three, which collects three brass, pewter, and bronze reliefs by Maggy Hamel-Metsos, two black-and-white inkjet prints on paper by Geneviève Cadieux, and a solitary impressionistic image called a failure by the painter Liza Lacroix.
Patrons mill about with wine glasses and Montellier cans clutched in hand, double kissing, laughing, mingling in spirals. The curatorial project at work here is about what is on the walls, yes. But it is also sub-textually about gathering together this assemblage of Montreal’s visual arts crowd for whom an au courant vernissage is an event worth braving a late-winter blizzard.
Credit gallerist Eli Kerr — for both the walls and crowd.
Kerr, 36, is one of a handful of visionary Montreal-based curators generating a buzz on The Main and, in doing so, reinvigorating a sense of novelty and delight amidst a global downturn in the art world. Sales in the worldwide art market fell by 12% in 2024 according to a study commissioned by Art Basel and UBS.
Nonetheless, now might be the most opportune moment to helm a new venture in the workaday art sector, where transactions have actually increased, and in a city like Montreal, where art is valued by a wider swath of the general population.
“I thought it was a good time,” Kerr deadpans of his counterintuitively deliberated enterprise, “because this is all I know. I can’t compare it to better times.”
Kerr relocated to St. Laurent in a storefront nestled between Mount-Royal and St. Joseph, right next door to kindred spirit Nicolas Robert, from a mezzanine-level gallery on Avenue du Parc that he opened during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. A native Montrealer, Kerr was away at that time in Ontario, working through a graduate degree in Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto.
“It made sense in uncertain times to head back to a place that one understood, and be home around my people,” says Kerr of his return five years ago. “My family, the artists, and the friends that I have. The first gallery came out of a sense of wanting to — needing to — do something.”
Kerr describes his initial commercial endeavour as no larger than a “parking space” that nonetheless allowed him to exhibit singular works of art in alternative ways, focussing specifically upon one sole piece, or a select assortment of them. And while museums and larger art centres were mandated by the government to be closed throughout the Covid crisis, street-level galleries like Kerr’s were among the few businesses allowed to remain in operation.
“I was able to walk this grey line,” recalls Kerr. “It provided that base necessity of being able to put on small-scale exhibitions. And then the opportunity to move to St. Laurent came up, and that opened up a lot of doors. I’m really committed to showing new work. Having artists show things they’ve never shown before. Departing from the precedent — that’s what we want to do in terms of exhibitions.”
Prior to being the proprietor of his own eponymous gallery, Kerr cut his teeth working as an assistant to a variety of local artists and eventually landing a job at Fonderie Darling. “I’ve been organizing exhibitions independently since about 2015,” Kerr tells me.
“There’s a world of insight you can gain working for people. But I’ve always found it hard to work in the arts for myriad reasons. It’s really tough to make a living. It’s tough to do the projects you want to do, in terms of artistic direction. The other option is working in a museum or in an artist-run centre. But you have to have a more by-committee way of making decisions and I really like working directly with artists. We can make decisions much quicker. We might be doing things totally backwards. But there’s an edge to that.”
At the St. Laurent location, Kerr represents nine artists, a small but robust stable of Francophone and Anglo, local and international talent. The current show on view is called “The Lion’s Share” by the photographer Fatine-Violette Sabiri, and Kerr gives me a walk-through of the gallery, describing what he finds fascinating about her works.
“A lot of the photographs are taken in these before-moments that are in the periphery to a main event,” he explains. “People preparing for a fashion show. There’s a bunch of horseback riders preparing for a competition. She’s looking at these side moments. It’s something spontaneous — and quite painterly.”
The curatorial turn more broadly betrays an impetus for the organization of people and things in a dynamic that implies a propensity for power, but reveals an aptitude for aesthetics. And Kerr possesses a keen eye and sensitivity for the artists and works of art he chooses to display in his space.
“It is such an intuitive process,” he says. “It takes a long time. The most important thing is the human relationship. You have to really want to live with their ideas. And vice versa. It’s a thick question. What I really like about our gallery is that everybody knows each other, more or less. There’s a certain chemistry in the group. It’s not just about the gallery’s relationship to each individual artist. We’re trying to make something where relationships emerge between the artists. I don’t think a lot of galleries work that way.”
While many of Kerr’s artists work within diverse media — sculpture, photography, ready-mades, drawing, and painting — there is a thread of contemporary relevance that sets his sights apart. Kerr seems to be acutely attuned to something in the zeitgeist of this precise place and time. A selection of Joyce Joumaa’s thermostat light boxes, for example, was acquired following her solo show last summer by the Musée d’art contemporain. Kerr’s is an artists’ art space that appeals not only to art lovers and collectors but also to art historians, musicians, writers, adjacent cultural workers, and most notably, his fellow curators.
“It’s been a nice surprise that the group of existing galleries has been very supportive of us,” says Kerr. “They frequent our gallery and come to our events. In most cases they are older than I am and have more experience. It is competitive — the perceived market is only so big. But at the end of the day, it’s good that we all support the same mandate of contemporary art. That does us all well.”
Kerr’s enthusiasm is infectious and evident in every subsequent show he produces. The next exhibition, he tells me, will showcase a series of artworks comprised of decomposing foodstuffs that the Torontonian artist Alan Belcher created. Still, Kerr’s affection for Montreal and the Plateau neighbourhood in particular is apparent in abundance.
“There’s a lot of energy here,” he observes. “It’s always been an exciting city that way. It’s interesting to think about the place of visual arts. But you have to follow the art.”◼︎
Since 1957, a solo exhibition by Alan Belcher opens 7 June and runs until 24 July 2025 at Galerie Eli Kerr, 4647 St. Laurent Boulevard.
Cover image: Eli Kerr photographed for NicheMTL.
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