He participated in
Quebec 75 (1975), with seventeen other artists and held a solo show (1976) at Concordia University when Georges Bogardi reviewed his work. In 1979, he was included as one of the six artists in
6 Propositions at the
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), where he was considered the odd man out because of his adherence to the figure. In 1988, he participated in a show with
Susanna Heller and
Medrie MacPhee at
Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Alberta. He has had an extensive exhibition history, both solo and group. In 2014, a solo at McMaster Museum of Art,
McMaster University, included Plotek's "History Paintings" curated by Ben Portis and selections from the
Sovfoto Archive at the
MacLaren Art Centre as parts of the exhibition, ''Workingman's Dead: Lives of the Artists''. Beginning in the 1990s, Plotek’s History Paintings revived something of the lost representational conceptions of painting in the 18th and 19th centuries, which he often applied to his imaginings of Soviet era scenes from the lives of various prominent figures such as Shostakovich and Isaac Babel. He painted himself as a baby with his nanny in the Hotel Metropole in Moscow, which was filled with party elite, and housed, in passing, various political prisoners and their keepers. The exhibition showcased paintings from 1979 to the present, with his most recent works alongside important earlier canvases. His work has been featured as well in numerous group exhibitions over the years, most notably at the inaugural exhibition of the
National Gallery of Canada (1988), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (1980), and the
Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) (1981, 1982, 2017, 2020 [curator: Mark Lanctôt]). His work is represented in major Canadian public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec City; and the Canada Council for the Arts, Ottawa. Plotek is represented by the Corkin Gallery in Toronto. He lives in Montreal and teaches at Concordia University in the Fine Arts, Studio faculty. ==References==