Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists

Sarah Sze’s first exhibition at Victoria Miro Venice, the artist’s sixth with Victoria Miro, marks a return to Venice for Sze, who featured in the 1999 and 2015 Biennales and represented the United States with her exhibition Triple Point in the 2013 Biennale.

Two immersive environments explore how images are constructed and memories are formed. In a new moving-image installation, entitled Sleepers, 2024, Sze transforms the gallery with an array of ever-changing projections suspended throughout the space that coalesce as both memento mori and memento vivere – a reminder that life is transient, and also that life must be lived.

Filmed on the occasion of Untitled Flowers, an exhibition of new paintings by Tal R. The paintings are complemented by a large-scale installation of new and recent drawings. On view in the waterside garden are a number of recent bronze sculptures by the artist.

An excerpt of Paula Rego: Secrets & Stories, the 2017 feature documentary directed by the artist’s son, filmmaker Nick Willing. Works relate to the exhibiton Paula Rego: Secrets of Faith, on view at Victoria Miro Venice, 23 April–18 June 2022.

A film by Gautier Deblonde on the occasion of an exhibition of new paintings by Celia Paul.

Cosmopolitan Super Fruits takes as a starting point the idea of the corner shop, a place of supply and consumption familiar to us all. In this body of work Kørner brings into focus modes of display and the movement of foodstuffs as they collide with aspects of contemporary politics and the dissemination of ecological thought in the context of ever-evolving concepts of the local, regional, national and global.

New paintings by the London-based artist draw upon various depictions of the Roman goddess Venus in mythology, art history and contemporary culture.

In Open, the first project to launch on Vortic VR, Doug Aitken has created what he sees as a new context for his artworks, both realised and speculative. Across four separate viewing rooms, viewers encounter Aitken’s artworks installed in imaginary architectural environments that are themselves set within a hyperreal world that is at once familiar and fantastical.

This innovative VR exhibition is available to view at the gallery on Oculus headsets. Open is also available to view on Vortic’s web and mobile app.

Click here to book a timed slot to experience Doug Aitken: Open

Explore on Vortic

Victoria Miro Projects is a dynamic series of online presentations by invited international artists in a specially conceived gallery on Vortic Collect. The inaugural project, Or is it because the problem is beautiful to me, features new works by Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Cain on view until 2 April 2022.

Sarah Cain moves beyond the traditional notion of painting within the frame by exploring abstraction and spatial interventions in a wide range of media and found materials. In this film, made especially for the artist's presentation for Victoria Miro Projects, Cain talks about her practice and, in particular, the influential role that music plays in her work.

An exhibition tour of Paula Rego: The Forgotten, held at the gallery 19 November 2021–12 February 2022, led by the artist’s son Nick Willing.

Held November–December 2021, the New York-based artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and first at Victoria Miro Venice featured new paintings from her ongoing series of botanical works in enamel paint, a medium the artist first worked with two decades ago.

Filmed on the occasion of the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring new paintings combining visual fragments from a myriad of sources, such as online and archival images, and personal photographs, which collapse past and present.

For his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Langberg shows paintings depicting a range of subjects, from queer love to wildflowers and sweeping landscapes.

Accompanied by an artist’s book with a new text by Olivia Laing, Chantal Joffe’s exhibition Story features a number of paintings of the artist’s mother and considers issues of aging, motherhood and visibility, focusing particularly on the complex relationship between mother and child over time. 

The exhibition is the third in a trilogy that began with a year of self-portraits, shown at Victoria Miro in 2019, followed by For Esme – with Love and Squalor, which captured the changing faces across the years of Joffe and her daughter, Esme, on view at Arnolfini, Bristol, in 2020.

A film of Yayoi Kusama's major presentation of new works at the gallery, featuring a dynamic installation of paintings from the artist's iconic My Eternal Soul series. Narrated by Akira Tatehata, author of the forthcoming exhibition publication. 

Coinciding with the opening of La Biennale di Venezia: The 17th International Architecture Exhibition, The Measures of Change (on view at Victoria Miro Venice, 19 May–10 July 2021) features a number of the artist’s celebrated Fracture sculptures, the debut of a new series of Perimeter Studies sculptures, and prints from a new body of work, Studies for The Patterns of Absence.

Conceived of as two distinct installations, each a reflection on aspects of the past year, The Seasons Turn included a suite of 28 watercolour and oil collaged works on paper that incorporate fragments of the score of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and an environment of enveloping blue paintings whose rich bands of colour are layered with the artist’s thoughts, feelings and responses to the past twelve months.

Filmed on the occasion of the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, which featured new two- and three-dimensional works in ceramic, crochet, fabric and pencil, and an earlier Eraserhead drawing that acts as a touchstone for this body of work.

The central theme of this recent exhibition is the quiet of catastrophe’s aftermath, a solemnity that points as much towards modes of resilience and adaptation as it does to the crushing devastation of loss. This theme takes shape through María Berrío’s narration of a small Colombian fishing village that has undergone a tragedy. In these works, the artist explores how the formation of historical memory occurs amidst processes of grieving in a village that maps the site of her own imagination.

An increasingly prominent voice among a new generation of figurative painters, Doron Langberg has gained a reputation for works that, luminous in colour and often large in scale, hinge on a sense of intimacy. Depicting himself, his family, friends and lovers, Langberg’s paintings celebrate the physicality of touch – in subject matter and process – a closeness that engages with new dialogues around queer sensuality and sexuality.

During a recent two-month residency, Flora Yukhnovich used the opportunity to engage more fully with Venetian culture. Her sources include the music of Vivaldi and the memoirs of Casanova, in addition to one of her key influences, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, whose works she was able to study first hand to create this new suite of paintings for this exhibition.

Created in 2016, this is a preview of a film by Stephen Willats, released ahead of his major exhibition Human Right at Mima, Middlesbrough (4 March – 4 June 2017). 

A preview of Doug Aitken's exhibition Return to the Real at Victoria Miro.

A preview of Doug Aitken's exhibition Return to the Real at Victoria Miro.

A preview of Doug Aitken's exhibition Return to the Real at Victoria Miro.

Grayson Perry discusses Super Rich Interior Decoration, his new exhibition at Victoria Miro Mayfair (25 September–20 December 2019), casting an anthropological eye on the heady collision of art, money, power and desire. 

A teaser of Isaac Julien's new nine-screen installation, which premiered at Victoria Miro. The work traverses a collection of Lina Bo Bardi’s most iconic buildings, offering a meditation on the work and legacy of the visionary modernist architect and designer (1914–1992).

Held at Victoria Miro Mayfair (5 June–27 July 2019) Howardena Pindell’s first solo exhibition in the UK included abstract paintings and collages drawn from two distinct periods in the artist’s career: large-scale spray paintings from the early 1970s; and smaller wall-mounted three-dimensional works completed since 2007.

On New Year’s Day, 2018, the artist set herself the challenge of working on a self-portrait every day for the coming year. This daily practice – through personal lows and highs, in the shifting white light of a prolonged London winter and the savage heat of New York in summer – has resulted in a series of characteristically unflinching works.

As a new exhibition opens at Wharf Road, the renowned Indian artist discusses the ideas and process behind his major installation Reclaiming the Inner Space.

In this film of the exhibition at Victoria Miro Mayfair (on view until 21 December 2018) David Anfam, writer, critic and Senior Consulting Curator at the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, reflects on the poetic and historical resonances in Ilse D'Hollander's work. Anfam's essay, Silent Songs, features in a new book on the artist, published by Victoria Miro.

A new film by Gautier Deblonde shot on location in Paulatem, Ilse D’Hollander’s home between 1995 and 1997, Galerie In Den Bouw, Kalken, the venue of the artist’s first and only solo exhibition during her lifetime, and the Zwalm countryside, summer 2018. Produced on the occasion of the first solo exhibition in the UK of works by the late Belgian artist, the film features a rare text written by D'Hollander, read by the Belgian actor Francesca Vanthielen.

On the occasion of her solo exhibition at Victoria Miro Venice, the renowned Brazilian artist discusses the ideas behind and links between the works and their powerful resonances with the city of Venice.

For Frieze Sculpture 2018, selected by Clare Lilley, Director of Programme, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Conrad Shawcross has created a new work, titled Optic Labyrinth (Arrangement I), 2018. Taking the form of a simple immersive maze, the work engages with the sun and its shifting position throughout the day and the seasons, focusing specifically on how people navigate and orientate themselves both emotionally and physically in relation to its rise and fall.

‘You’re having this filmic way of reading images as they move, and you move, through space.’ In this film, the artist discusses the site-specific works in her new exhibition at Victoria Miro.

A short film on the occasion of the artist's exhibition of new and recent pastels at Victoria Miro Venice (14 April – 19 May 2018). 

Quiet, reflective and mysterious, new paintings by the Brooklyn-based artist continue an intuitive approach to image-making, where the world we inhabit is filtered through the artist’s own psychological landscape. 

An exhibition comprising paintings and an installation of unique chandeliers by the Mexico-based Cuban-American artist is on view until 24 March 2018 at Victoria Miro, Wharf Road.

An exhibition by Mark Wallinger, presented by Victoria Miro in collaboration with Hauser & Wirth. Selected by the artist especially for Victoria Miro Venice, the works on display date from 1991 to 2016 and reflect a career-long engagement with ideas of power, authority, artifice and illusion. Many of the works on show make use of photography or simulacra in order to test the extent to which the potency of an image or object transcends reproduction. In his celebrated work, I am Innocent, 2010, Wallinger makes a life-size, double-sided reproduction of Velazquez's Pope Innocent X (in the Palazzo Pamphilj, Rome), one side as Velázquez painted it, the other reversed, and, suspending it from the ceiling, sets it in motion so that it spins continuously, to beguiling optical effect. 

'It doesn't matter how conceptual a work is, it's still the idea that you're looking through a keyhole.' On the occasion of his exhibitions Academy of Tal R at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (until 21 January 2018), and Sexshops at Victoria Miro (until 20 December 2017), Tal R talks about his work in a video interview with Elephant.

Film ©/courtesy Elephant

Filmed on the occasion of John Kørner: Altid Mange Problemer at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (18 June – 13 August 2017), the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date, Kørner talks about the genesis of his work, including his signature use of yellow, his 2008 series based on the human tragedy of war, and the shifting form and meaning of ‘Problems’ in his work. As he says: ‘I mostly recognise a “Problem” as a metaphor for ongoing life.’

Isaac Julien and Mark Nash’s Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996) is a film portrait of the revolutionary, writer and psychiatrist, whose classic publications The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin White Mask (1952) remain the bibles of decolonisation. The new, digitally-remastered 2K version of the film receives its world premiere at the 2017 BFI London Film Festival.

Edith Devaney, Contemporary Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and author of the catalogue essay for Milton Avery at Victoria Miro Mayfair (7 June - 29 July 2017) introduces Avery's work and talks about the exhibition. The talk took place at Victoria Miro Mayfair on the evening of 10 July 2017.

“I love you Harlem…” Filmed on the occasion of the exhibition Alice Neel, Uptown curator Hilton Als reads an undated poem by the painter Alice Neel. The exhibition focuses on paintings made by the artist during the five decades in which she lived and worked in upper Manhattan, first in Spanish (East) Harlem, where she moved in 1938, and, later, the Upper West Side, where she lived from 1962 until her death in 1984. Alice Neel, Uptown continues at Victoria Miro, Wharf Road, London until 29 July 2017, and Victoria Miro Venice until 16 September 2017.

A new commission for the inaugural ARoS Triennial: The Garden, End of Times, Beginning of Times, Sarah Sze's Hammock (For Rauschenberg) stretches across a wooded ravine which drops sharply to the sea. Divided into three sections (The Past, The Present and The Future) the Triennial focuses on depictions of nature throughout history and features works by international artists. Sze's work is included in The Future, which explores artistic responses to environmental change. Film by outofsync-artinfocus.com.

On the occasion of Julien’s exhibition of photographic works “I dream a world” Looking for Langston, at Victoria Miro (until 29 July 2017), Isaac Julien and Hilton Als discuss the genesis of the film, their shared love of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, the work’s relationship to black gay desire, to AIDS and to questions of discrimination, and how, as Julien says, “these questions return to haunt the present.”

The Interpretation of Movement (a 9:8 in blue) is Conrad Shawcross RA’s largest mechanical work to date, stretching out to a 16m diameter as it methodically turns above St Pancras International station. It marks the fifth year of the Terrace Wires public sculpture commission at the station and the third in partnership with the Royal Academy. The commission is the Royal Academy’s only external public sculpture series in London and is free to view. Film courtesy Terrace Wires in partnership with the Royal Academy of Arts.

Isaac Julien’s seminal work Looking for Langston (1989/2017) is the focus of the exhibition  “I dream a world” Looking for Langston, an exhibition of newly-conceived, large-scale and silver gelatin photographic works and archival material, on display at Victoria Miro (18 May – 29 July).  A rare screening of Looking for Langston in its original 16mm format, followed by a conversation between Isaac Julien and Tate curator Zoe Whitley, will take place in the Clore Auditorium, Tate Britain, Thursday 20 July, 7 - 9pm.

On display during 2017 as part of Desert X in the Coachella Valley, Mirage presents a continually changing encounter in which subject and object, inside and outside, are in constant flux.

Created from stitched planes of translucent, coloured polyester fabric Suh's Hubs – delicately precise, weightless impressions of corridor-like points of intersection between rooms – seem to exist between imagination and reality, past and present. To move through them is to experience a distinct emotional register, a sense of being in flux, crossing boundaries and moving between psychological states. Filmed on the occasion of Do Ho Suh: Passage/s at Victoria Miro, February – March 2017. © Do Ho Suh, courtesy Marjoleine Boonstra and Reinier van Brummelen.

A sneak peek in the studio with the artist, on the occasion of his being honoured at the 2016 Hirshhorn Gala

The artist's work for Frieze Sculpture Park 2016. Selected by Clare Lilley, Director of Programme at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 'Monolith (Optic)' is an entrancing new addition to Regent’s Park, appearing to change endlessly according to shifting light conditions. On view 5 October 2016 - 8 January 2017. Filmed by Digital Wasp.

A tour through the exhibition Yayoi Kusama, at Victoria Miro and Victoria Miro Mayfair.