Marion Wagschal's five decades of identity work open at National Gallery until January 17

Marion Wagschal's entire artistic practice emerges from a single, unforgettable fact: her mother survived the Holocaust, but nearly everyone else in her family did not. At 83, the Montreal-based artist is now sharing five decades of that reckoning in her first major exhibition outside Quebec.

Marion Wagschal: Cyclops and Other Tales opened September 11 at the National Gallery of Canada and runs through January 17, 2027. The exhibition displays over five decades of never-before-shown studio materials — personal archives, paintings, sketches, notebooks, and photographs — in what the National Gallery calls her first retrospective presentation to a national audience.

Wagschal was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1943 to parents who had survived the war. She immigrated to Canada at nine years old. "The war was like a lingering smell in the house," said exhibition curator Anaïs Castro, who has collaborated with Wagschal twice before, most recently at Arsenal Contemporary in New York in 2022. "It was always present, and despite moments of laughter and joy, you couldn't shake that sort of stench."

The exhibition highlights two distinct sides of Wagschal's practice: paintings that are deliberate and calculated, and drawings that are fast and intuitive. Large canvases line the gallery walls — many taller than Wagschal herself — while ephemera and sketches fill the centre of the room, revealing obsessive, strange, and bizarrely urgent studies made in private.

Among them is "Cyclops" (1972), an oil painting of a nude self-portrait in muted colours. The figure is slouched, with uneven nipples and visible folds and wrinkles — no idealization, no flattery. "I like to imagine that there's potentially a second eye that you don't see on the face that is actually looking inward," Castro said of Wagschal's self-identification as cyclops. Much of her work, she explained, is a clear representation of the artist's internal experience.

The exhibition also includes "Cyclorama" (1988), depicting a room full of women embodying different female archetypes. Throughout, Wagschal's practice explores intimacy, the female body, and the vulnerability of being a woman — each piece an act of unflinching self-witness.