Now on view at the National Gallery of Canadam Sylvia Safdie: TERRA, feels disarmingly modest. There is no drama, there are no pyrotechnics, just her lifelong, primal relationship with the Earth, using literal raw soil as her primary art medium.
This is the first major exhibition dedicated to the Montreal-based artist at the institution and it arrives, perhaps belatedly, as a corrective. Safdie has long occupied a curious position in Canadian art: widely respected, yet rarely foregrounded. TERRA makes a convincing case for her quiet persistence over five decades.
What emerges across the 19 works on display is not a linear narrative but a way of thinking. Safdie works with earth, stone, wax, bronze and pigment not as materials, but possibly more importantly ,as carriers of memory. Her practice sits somewhere between sculpture, archaeology and meditation.
The centrepiece, Earth II (1977–2025), is deceptively simple: hundreds of small piles of soil collected over nearly half a century. Yet its impact is cumulative. Each sample is tied to a place, a moment, a relationship. Seen together, they form an archive that resists borders and hierarchies. The work feels particularly resonant now, in an era defined by both displacement and ecological anxiety.
Left: Sylvia Safdie, Earth Marks Series XVIII, No. 5 (detail), 2002–20, earth, graphite, oil on Mylar.
Middle: Sylvia Safdie, Heads Series IV, No. 5, 2010, earth, graphite, oil on Mylar, 206 × 107 cm.
Right: Sylvia Safdie, Heads (detail), 1993–2021, stone, steel, bronze, wax, 13 × 360 × 182 cm.
All images courtesy of the artist. © Sylvia Safdie. Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay.
Safdie’s approach has often been described as contemplative, and that is accurate, though perhaps insufficient. There is also a quiet insistence at play. In Assemblages II, begun in the 1980s and completed this year, natural objects sit alongside their cast counterparts in glass, bronze and steel. The doubling is both subtle and unsettling. It raises questions about authenticity, permanence and the human impulse to replicate the natural world in more durable forms.
Her paintings, particularly the Earth Marks series, extend this inquiry. Made with linseed oil and raw pigments drawn from her own collection of soils, they are literally composed of the material they reference. From a distance, they read as abstract gestures; up close, they begin to suggest landscapes, bodies, even traces of movement. Safdie has often spoken about transformation, and here it unfolds slowly, almost imperceptibly.
Over a multi-decade career, Sylvia Safdie has rejected traditional synthetic paints to masterfully use unrefined dirt, sand
and dust to paint, sculpt and build grand-scale installations. Sylvia Safdie portrait by Patrick Andrew Boivin
If there is a tension in the exhibition, it lies in its restraint. For some, the absence of overt narrative or political framing may feel elusive but to me, it is also its strength. Safdie’s work resists easy interpretation. It asks for attention rather than reaction.
In recent years, there has been renewed interest in artists working with natural materials and ecological themes. Safdie, however, is not following a trend. She has been doing this since the 1970s, long before such concerns entered the mainstream of contemporary art discourse.
TERRA does not seek to overwhelm. Instead, it accumulates meaning slowly, like sediment. By the end, what lingers is not a single image, but a heightened awareness of material itself, and of our place within it.
Sylvia Safdie: TERRA
National Gallery of Canada
10 December 2025 – 25 October 2026
More information and tickets, HERE.
Author: Lina Ress
Lead image: Sylvia Safdie, Assemblages II (detail), 1986–2025. Courtesy of the artist. © Sylvia Safdie. Photo: Simon Belleau.
Other international exhibitions recommended by I-M Inquisitive Minds include Dancing the Revolution, MCA Chicago; Carol Bove, Guggenheim New York; and Pedagogies of War, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Madrid.
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