In 1980, Hendeles established The Ydessa Gallery in
Toronto, a commercial space devoted to the presentation of Canadian contemporary art. Hendeles closed The Ydessa Gallery in 1988. In October 1987, Hendeles purchased a two-storey former uniforms factory at 778 King Street West in downtown
Toronto as the headquarters and exhibition site for a new art foundation. In November 1988, after extensive renovations, the 14,000-square-foot industrial building became home of the
Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Canada's first privately supported contemporary-art exhibition space. Hendeles launched her new exhibition program in December 1987 with
Katharina Fritsch: Our Lady of Lourdes, presented at the
Toronto Eaton Centre (the city's most popular downtown shopping mall). For the week leading up to Christmas, the peak of the mall's busiest shopping season, Hendeles installed Fritsch's sculpture of a small Madonna of Lourdes statue, enlarged to adult size and rendered in bright, yellow-painted Duroplast resin, in the middle of the pedestrian mall. The sculpture was positioned so the
Church of the Holy Trinity, the historic Anglican Church adjacent to the western side of the mall would be visible in the background. The Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation was formally established in 1988 with a mandate to provide a program of contemporary-art exhibitions from a developing collection. In November 1988, the gallery space opened its inaugural show,
Christian Boltanski, a five-gallery exhibition of the French artist’s work. This included the site-specific commission
Canada (1988), the artist's first clothing-based work. In 1996, ''
Maclean's'' magazine published a profile by Sharon Doyle Driedger on Hendeles and her exhibition program at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. In the article, Driedger noted Hendeles’s influence on the art world: Hendeles has managed to pique the interest of the art world by collecting and showing works by such luminaries as British photographer
Eadweard Muybridge and American sculptor
Louise Bourgeois. “These works are sought after by any great institution in the world,” says Marcel Brisebois (
fr), director of the
Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art. “She has a great eye. When she buys something, we look at her and say, ‘Oh, why is she doing so?’” Her bold aesthetic vision led
ARTnews, a respected U.S. journal, to twice include her in its list of “the art world’s 50 most influential people” in 1993 and 1995—the only Canadian and one of just a handful of women. “Every museum curator who is not asleep knows about her,” says
Robert Storr, a curator at New York City’s renowned
Museum of Modern Art. Storr adds that for exhibitions of videos, films, photography and installations, “there is absolutely no better place in the world” than Hendeles’s foundation. In his book
Private Spaces for Contemporary Art (2010),
Peter Doroshenko described the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation as functioning “more like an intellectual visual arts laboratory than an art centre or private collection space,” and declared its gallery “one of the most important contemporary spaces in North America.” The Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation maintained its exhibition program in Toronto until 2012, when its building was sold and the gallery closed its doors. The Foundation, however, continues to function as a not-for-profit organization in Toronto, and in 2015 it established a studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the former studio of the photographer Philippe Halsman at the historic Atelier building.
Exhibitions In 2003, Hendeles guest-curated
Partners, an exhibition for the
Haus der Kunst, Munich, at the invitation of then-incoming director
Chris Dercon and the new chief curator, Thomas Weski. Presented in three passages, spread over 16 museum galleries, Hendeles positioned work by
Diane Arbus,
Maurizio Cattelan,
James Coleman,
Hanne Darboven,
Walker Evans,
Luciano Fabro,
On Kawara,
Paul McCarthy,
Bruce Nauman,
Giulio Paolini,
Jeff Wall and
Lawrence Weiner, together with photojournalistic images, anonymous vernacular photographs and antique objects. This exhibition also included Hendeles’s own artwork
The Teddy Bear Project, 2002, a large-scale installation built around an archive of family-album photographs, each including the image of a teddy bear (see external link below). In 2004, the French filmmaker
Agnès Varda made part of the exhibition the subject of her documentary short,
Ydessa, les ours et etc..
The Teddy Bear Project was first shown in the group exhibition
sameDIFFERENCE at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation in Toronto (2002). It was expanded as a two-gallery installation for
Partners in 2003, then remounted in
Noah’s Ark curated by
Pierre Théberge for the
National Gallery of Canada (2004) and
10,000 Lives, the 2010
Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, curated by
Massimiliano Gioni. It was exhibited again in 2016 at New York's
New Museum in
The Keeper, a group show also curated by Gioni. Other exhibitions include
Marburg! The Early Bird! at the Marburger Kunstverein (
de), Germany (2010);
The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project) at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2011); and
THE BIRD THAT MADE THE BREEZE TO BLOW at Galerie Johann König,
Berlin (2012). Hendeles's work
From her wooden sleep... (2013) was shown at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, UK in 2015, curated by Philip Larratt-Smith (see external link below). In 2016, Hendeles expanded and augmented
From her wooden sleep… specifically for the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art (now the Eyal Ofer Pavilion for Contemporary Art) at the
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, curated by
Suzanne Landau. Hendeles reinterpreted
From her wooden sleep... as an artist book published by Hatje Cantz in 2016. In 2016 Hendeles’s installation
Death to Pigs was mounted at Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto, her first exhibition in Toronto since closing the YHAF gallery space in 2012. A catalogue for
Death to Pigs was published in 2018. In the summer of 2017, Hendeles’s exhibition
The Milliner’s Daughter was shown at Toronto’s
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, curated by
Gaëtane Verna. This was the first major survey of Hendeles’s work in a public museum. In 2018, the
Kunsthalle Wien mounted
Death to Pigs, the first institutional retrospective of Hendeles’s work in Europe, taking as its title the name of her installation first shown in Toronto in 2016. Curated by
Nicolaus Schafhausen (Director, Kunsthalle Wien), the exhibition was spread over both floors of the Kunsthalle and included work by the artist drawn from the previous decade. In 2019, Schafhausen featured Hendeles’s work,
The Steeple and The People (2018), a site-specific installation at Munich’s Abtei St. Bonifaz (
St. Boniface's Abbey) as part of the group exhibition
Tell me about yesterday tomorrow he curated with Mirjam Zadoff (
de) and Juliane Bischoff for NS-Dokumentationszentrum München (
Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism). In 2024, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto presented Hendeles's exhibition
Grand Hotel as an official Collateral Event of the 60th Venice Biennale. Curated by Wayne Baerwaldt in collaboration with Project Producer Barbara Edwards,
Grand Hotel was mounted at Spazio Berlendis on the Rio dei Mendicanti in the Cannaregio district of Venice.
Awards and recognition Hendeles was inducted as a Member into the
Order of Canada in 2004 and the
Order of Ontario in 1998. She received a
Governor General’s Award in 2002 for "Outstanding Contribution in the Visual and Media Arts." She was awarded a
Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002 and a
Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. Hendeles received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art (D.F.A. h.c.) from the
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1996, an Honorary Doctorate of Laws (LL.D. h.c.) from the
University of Toronto in 2000 and an Honorary Doctorate of Philosophy (Dr.phil h.c.) from Philipps-Universität Marburg (
University of Marburg) in 2017. She was named an Honorary Fellow of the Ontario College of Art and Design (now
OCAD University) in 1998 and received an "Award of Distinction" from the Faculty of Fine Arts of
Concordia University, Montreal in 2009. Hendeles received the 2004 "Founders Achievement Award," presented by the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts and the 2003 “Award of Distinction,” from the Toronto International Art Fair (now
Art Toronto). In 2007, she was named a Life Member of
Art Metropole, Toronto. The Ontario Association of Art Galleries, now
Galeries Ontario / Ontario Galleries (GOG), has honoured Hendeles with multiple awards: • Award for Outstanding Achievement (1998), conferred in its inaugural year in recognition of the “curatorial excellence and innovative programming at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation.” • Best Exhibition Installation and Design Award (2003), for
sameDIFFERENCE at Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation • Exhibition of the Year Award (2003), for
sameDIFFERENCE at Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation • Special Recognition Award (2007), for the exhibition
Predators & Prey at Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation • Special Recognition Award (2008), for the exhibition
Dead! Dead! Dead! at Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation • Exhibition of the Year Award (2011), for
Marburg! The Early Bird! at the Marburger Kunstverein, Germany • Art Publication of the Year Award (2017), for the artist’s book
From her wooden sleep…, published by Hatje Cantz In 2003,
The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper chose Hendeles as its “Artist of the Year.” ==Publications==