Sterbak, renowned in the 1990s for her provocative installations about the human body and her unusual choices of materials, has not shown much in Canada in recent years but returns with a vengeance in 2025.Andrej Ivanov/The Globe and Mail
In a small Montreal historical museum full of medical instruments and religious objects, there is a display case featuring human bones and a skull. The bones don’t seem out of place beside the plaster models of organs or the reliquaries holding the remains of saints – except for one thing: They are made of chocolate.
Jana Sterbak strikes again. The artist, renowned in the 1990s for her provocative installations about the human body and her unusual choices of materials, has not shown much in Canada in recent years but returns with a vengeance in 2025.
The chocolate bones, entitled Catacombs and dating to 1992, are part of an exhibition of the artist’s own devising: With curator Johanne Sloan, she has inserted her own work into the collection of the Musée des Hospitalières de l’Hôtel-Dieu, which houses both religious and medical artifacts belonging to the nursing sisters who ran Montreal’s first hospital. The curator and artist have paired a set of oversized crutches (Monumental, 2002) with a bishop’s gold staff and placed a glass orb containing a person’s sweat (Perspiration: Olfactory Portrait, 1995) among the reliquaries.
Meanwhile, the Esker Foundation in Calgary is planning a major retrospective of the artist’s work that will open in September.
“She hasn’t had a major retrospective or major exhibition in Canada since 1991, when the National Gallery did States of Being,” said Esker director Naomi Potter. “It’s so overdue in terms of the significance of her practice. And, she is going to be 70 next month.”
Sterbak’s notorious Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, seen in a rebuild at the Musée des Hospitalières de l’Hotel Dieu de Montreal exhibit.Andrej Ivanov/The Globe and Mail
At the National Gallery, States of Being became embroiled in controversy over the so-called “meat dress,” the piece that would become Sterbak’s most notorious work. Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic is a form-fitting dress sewn from pieces of flank steak that gradually dry out during an exhibition. Sterbak first created it in 1987 and it had been shown in several Canadian venues without incident when curator Diana Nemiroff included it in the 1991 show. Conservative MP Felix Holtmann got wind of the show and media began asking food banks and shelters what they thought. Canada was in the grips of recession at the time and the predictable answer was that the dress represented a waste of food.
“I was just a little annoyed,” Sterbak recalled in a recent interview, calling it a manufactured controversy. “I didn’t talk to any of the press. I simply released a statement that it was not about the waste of food, that there is no shortage of food in Canada.”
At a press conference, Nemiroff also suggested the gallery was in the business of making art shows, not feeding people.
“She always said at the time that the piece was about aging,” Nemiroff said in a recent interview, noting that Sterbak had made the work in her 30s, a decade in which women first notice that their bodies are aging. “There are a lot of transformations of the flesh, and one of them is desiccation.”
“One had to start with the material and then look for the metaphor,” Nemiroff said. “So her larger statement is really about the human condition, the frequent absurdity of the human condition. It’s perilousness, so easy to crumble or decay or melt. She’s used ice, she’s used bread, she’s used flesh.”
More recently the artist has used granite, lead and bronze in a series of pieces, some of which will be included in the Calgary show.
“A lot of my work has to do with heaviness,” Sterbak said. “It might be small scale, but it’s very heavy. For example, I have a small little balloon. It’s painted as a beach ball, but it’s made out of lead, and it’s no more than 12 inches in diameter, but you cannot pick it up with one hand. I like that kind of duality.”
After the National Gallery fuss, and a similar controversy when the show toured to Calgary the following year, Canadians didn’t hear much from Sterbak, although she did represent Canada at the 2003 Venice Biennale. She kept a house in Montreal but mainly lived in Spain and France, where there is great enthusiasm for the way she combines subtle ideas with strong materials. “There’s a lot of conceptual work in France but it’s not necessarily as physical as my work, it doesn’t have a presence in the space,” she said.
She also suggests that there’s a shared appreciation of black humour in French and Czech culture: Sterbak immigrated to Vancouver as a young teenager when her parents fled Czechoslovakia after the Soviet-led invasion of 1968. Her mother was a doctor and her father a philosophy professor: Although she wanted to go to art school, they were determined that she have an academic education. The family compromised on a fine-arts program at Montreal’s Concordia University. Part of a cohort of young feminist artists interested in making art about the body, she quickly established a career in Montreal but eventually found herself drawn back to Europe.
Today, the two museums that own versions of Vanitas – and the right to rebuilt it for each showing – are abroad: one is the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn., and the other is the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
“They say no one is a prophet in their own land, so I’m a good Canadian,” Sterbak said.
The artist’s own copy has been rebuilt by Montreal conservator Richard Gagnier for the Musée des Hospitalières and the nuns whose collection is held by the museum understood it perfectly, Sloan reports. Their hospital closed in 2017 when the building was sold to the City of Montreal and the museum has a secular administration, but the collection still belongs to the Hospitalières, a nursing order given its charter by Louis XIV. When Sterbak and Sloan approached the museum to mount its first ever collaboration with an outside artist, they had to meet with the nuns before the mother superior, Sister Nicole Gaudet, would give her approval. Sloan described the work with trepidation.
“What was amazing and wonderful to me is that they immediately got it,” she said. “The title Vanitas goes back to this European tradition, that urges people to reflect on the transience of human life, to think about time, mortality. They were just nodding and saying, ‘Yeah, of course, this is what we think about all the time: the immortal soul and the mortal body.’”
Another piece in the Montreal show is Chemise de Nuit, a 1993 piece that features a diaphanous white night gown with hair sewn to the front in the pattern of male chest hair: Potter sees the work as prescient with its notion that gender is not stable. Meanwhile, Sterbak’s works about the female body feel relevant today as women’s reproductive rights are under attack in the United States.
“We’re seeing a lot of women’s rights being eroded and taken away, calls for women to simply stay at home and make babies. This kind of work reminds us to stand tall and fight back,” Potter said. “Sometimes artists’ work ages and it feels like it has lost power. I think Jana’s work is actually more powerful, particularly in the current social-political climate.”
Corpus Insolite: Jana Sterbak continues at the Musée des Hospitalières de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 201 Pine Ave. W, Montreal, to Aug. 24. Jana Sterbak: Dimensions of Intimacy opens Sept. 19 at the Esker Foundation, 1011 9 Ave. SE, Calgary.
