I am Canadian by birth but I have been living in London for 7 years now so I don’t have the chance to go back to and visit very often, maybe once every one or two years. I’m from Montreal so I rarely go to the west of Canada, in fact I have only been there once before.

This year was my second time visiting in Alberta and I decided to see what the Edmonton art scene had to offer and I discovered the Art Gallery of Alberta on Church Square in the heart of the city. I was curious about the undulated laminated metal walls of its exterior as I first thought it was a building by Frank Gehry who made the famous Guggenheim in Bilbao. Well it turns out I wasn’t that far from the truth as my friend told me that the building was designed by one of his students: Randall Stout.

We went to see the Toulouse-Lautrec and La Vie Moderne: Paris 1880-1910 exhibition which was a pleasure for the eyes to see:

“This extraordinary exhibition highlights the wide spectrum of exciting work created by avant-garde artists in Paris around the turn of the century. Through dreamy Symbolist landscape paintings, edgy Parisian street scenes, intimate domestic tableaux, bawdy cabaret sketches, figure studies, portraits and still life compositions, it investigates a generation of artists continuing the battle against French Academic standards fought by the Impressionists and the Barbizon painters before them. – See more at: http://www.youraga.ca/exhibit/toulouselautrec#sthash.lSZBs7Wp.dpuf

Here are some picture of this amazing building, its interiors and the exhibition which I wasn’t supposed to take shhh…