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In contemporary art, the big story in 2009 will be the presentation at the Venice Biennale of a new work by London-based Canadian artist Mark Lewis (opening June 7). Lewis's short films (usually not more than four minutes in duration) customarily involve some form of architectural investigation, and this project will be no exception, taking the peculiar tepee-like modernist Canadian pavilion and re-imagining it as a sort of film projector in the Giardini di Biennale.

Another contemporary-art high point: the Montréal Biennial, organized this year by another Londoner, Scott Burnham, for the Centre international d'art contemporain (May 1 to 31). “Open Culture” is the declared theme of this multimedia event, involving a host of Canadian and international artists.

A cluster of promising exhibitions in Vancouver this winter will make it a hot zone over the next few months. A show of recent work by leading Vancouver sculptor Liz Magor, titled The Mouth and other storage facilities (from the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle) lands at the Simon Fraser University Art Gallery on Jan. 10 (to Feb. 21). The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia is staging Action – Camera: Beijing Performance Photography (Jan. 16 to April 19). And Catriona Jeffries Gallery is presenting a body of work by another Vancouver up-and-comer: Gareth Moore (Jan. 15 to Feb. 14). It all comes to a head with the Vancouver Art Gallery's group exhibition of new work by Vancouver artists titled How Soon Is Now: Contemporary Art from Here, opening Feb. 7 (to May 3). A major survey of large-scale photographs by German artist Andreas Gursky follows at the VAG in the spring (May 30 to Sept. 13).

Montreal will be hit by a colour surge this winter, with two notable paintings shows. The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal is staging a retrospective of the work of Quebec painter Claude Tousignant, a legendary creator of bold, hard-edged, high-chroma abstractions (Feb. 5 to April 26). And, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Van Dongen: A Fauve in the City (Jan. 22 to April 19) presents 200 paintings, prints, drawings and Fauvist ceramics by Kees Van Dongen, the “interwar painter of elegant neurosis.”

If the pre-Raphaelites give you raptures, pencil in the Art Gallery of Ontario's Sin and Salvation: Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision (Feb. 14 to May 10), an in-depth look at the 19th-century British artist and his circle (among them, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti). The show is being organized by the AGO's Katherine Lochnan (of recent Whistler, Turner, Monet fame). Also this year: J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Oct. 1 to Feb. 7, 2010), showcasing the work of John William Waterhouse. Both shows highlight a moment in British culture that has important implications for Canadians, being concurrent with a key moment in the formation of our colonial identity.