Recent News

The Globe and Mail
Published December 18, 2025

Homecoming queen of the year: Jana Sterbak

Jana Sterbak had not been highly visible in Canada in recent years. The artist, one of the country’s most reliably provocative creators of art about the body, was perhaps better appreciated in Europe. She still divides her time between Montreal, Spain and France, but in 2025 she celebrated a big professional homecoming. She began in Montreal in February at the Musée des Hospitalières de l’Hôtel-Dieu, where she organized, with curator Johanne Sloan, a highly unusual intervention into the collection of medical instruments and religious objects held by an order of nuns. Chocolate bones were displayed alongside reliquaries and oversized crutches beside a bishop’s staff.

Then in September, the Esker Foundation in Calgary organized her first major Canadian show since 1991, including such works as a loaf of bread in the shape of a full-sized mattress, a metal couch that can give the viewer an electric shock, and the once-notorious Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, sewn together from raw flank steak. In a world characterized by diminishing abortion rights and plastic surgery run amok, Sterbak’s work feels as pertinent today as it did in the 1980s and 1990s. – KATE TAYLOR