6 - 9 October 2016
London
Victoria Miro is delighted to participate in Frieze London (Stand C4) with a three-room presentation of works by Yayoi Kusama, Grayson Perry, and Chantal Joffe.
New and recent paintings by Yayoi Kusama include a work from the artist’s important, ongoing series My Eternal Soul, in addition to examples of her iconic Infinity Nets and a series of monochrome silkscreens on canvas. The presentation coincides with the opening of Yayoi Kusama: Dot Obsessions at Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE. Yayoi Kusama: In Infinity at Helsinki Art Museum opens on 7 October. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors opens at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C on 23 February. The exhibition includes her latest mirror room All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, which recently premiered at Victoria Miro as part of Kusama’s extensive solo exhibition during summer 2016.
Ahead of his much-anticipated new book The Descent of Man, published by Penguin on 27 October 2016, the gallery will present a selection of works by Grayson Perry. The centrepiece is The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman (detail shown here), the original version of which was made for the eponymous exhibition at the British Museum in 2011 - 2012. The sculpture, a lavish cast iron tomb in the form of a ship encrusted with reliefs and artistic cargo based on or cast from objects in the collection of the British Museum, has been subsequently included in important exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark, the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. This is its first presentation in London since the British Museum exhibition.
New works include pieces created during the making of Perry’s 2016 Channel 4 series All Man, including The Digmoor Tapestry, a cartographical representation of the Digmoor Estate in Skelmersdale, and its companion piece, King of Nowhere, a cast iron fetish sculpture of a figure pierced with knives and scissors, festooned with bottle tops and surrounded by candles and miniature spirit bottles. Referring to these recent works as being like “altarpieces to parts of my society that aren’t talked about or articulated,” Perry creates a portrait of contemporary masculinity as being both fiercely territorial and somehow lost. Also on display are works made as part of Perry’s BAFTA winning Channel 4 series Who are You?, which was accompanied by a solo presentation of works on the theme of portraiture and British identity at the National Portrait Gallery in 2014 - 2015. A portrait in pot form, The Huhne Vase makes reference to former cabinet minister Chris Huhne’s fall from grace. Highlighting the importance that public figures display their vulnerability, Perry smashed the pot and then put it back together, repairing it in a way that celebrates its fragility by painting the cracks with gold leaf. I Am a Man is a patinated brass figure of a young female-to-male transsexual, Alex (Alexander White-Huggins). Obsessed as a child by JM Barrie’s creation Peter Pan, Alex is depicted by Perry in a pose echoing that of the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. In a rare, white on black version of the etching A Map of Days, Perry portrays himself as a fortified town. To suggest the passage of time, he concluded each day spent working on the map by marking a point on the map with the date, while at its centre an open piazza represents an absence that Perry feels lies at the core of identity.
A selection of paintings from the series Hannah, Gertrude, Alice, Betty, Nadine, Golda, Susan, Claude, Nancy, Grace, Diane… by Chantal Joffe focuses on Jewish women who have made major contributions to twentieth-century art, literature, philosophy and politics, including Diane Arbus, Susan Sontag, Claude Cahun, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. Joffe conducted months of research to gather information and generate personal connections to each subject. Premiered at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 2015, the intimate portraits are charged with the artist’s technical, conceptual and emotional responses to these notable historical figures.