Announcing our autumn programme

We are delighted to announce the autumn programme across our spaces in London and Venice – including the gallery’s first solo exhibitions by Paula Rego, Doron Langberg and Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, and exhibitions of new work by Sarah Sze and Inka Essenhigh.

Doron Langberg: Give Me Love

3 September–6 November 2021

Victoria Miro

An increasingly prominent voice among a new generation of figurative painters, New York-based artist 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. For his first exhibition with the gallery, Langberg will show near-abstract large-scale depictions that give material form to moments of desire, alongside paintings which are drawn from a group of works made while visiting his home in Yokneam, Israel, after many months of being away. While there, he painted his family, close friends, spring wildflowers, and for the first time – pure landscapes. These large panoramic works will be shown alongside the chromatic depictions of figures in interiors for which he has become known.

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami

3 September–6 November 2021

Victoria Miro

Based in the UK, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami was born in Gutu, Zimbabwe and lived in South Africa from the ages of nine to seventeen. Her work reveals a deeply personal vision of Southern African life. Drawing on her experiences of geographical dislocation and displacement, her paintings combine visual fragments from a myriad of sources such as online images and personal photographs, which collapse past and present. Powerful nudes are a point of departure and in this exhibition of new works – the artist’s first with the gallery – Hwami boldly raises questions about human experience in relation to spirituality. Here, Hwami observes how the spiritual experience manifests itself in the body and begins to make itself known by leaving marks, letters, and notes on the physical form. The exhibition considers existence in a time and space where people are investigating sexual, spiritual and political identity, especially those whose bodies have prescribed ways of existing.

Sarah Sze

12 October–6 November 2021

Victoria Miro

Celebrated for her intricate multimedia installations, in recent years American artist Sarah Sze has returned to painting. New wall-based works continue her decades-long exploration of the ways in which the proliferation of images – printed in magazines and newspapers, gleaned from the Web and television, intercepted from outer space, and ultimately imprinted on our conscious and unconscious selves – fundamentally changes our relationship to physical objects, memories, and time.

Paula Rego: The Forgotten

19 November 2021–22 January 2022

Victoria Miro

Celebrated as a peerless storyteller, Paula Rego has often brought immense psychological insight and imaginative power to the stories that we try to suppress or tell ourselves only in private. Testament to a career spent exploring these hidden narratives and their associated stigmas, The Forgotten encircles themes and subjects that are often masked or concealed – out of politeness or embarrassment – such as mental illness and old age. Held across the entirety of its Wharf Road spaces, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by the artist brings together significant individual works and important series, many rarely shown, drawn principally from the past 20 years.

The largest and most comprehensive retrospective of Rego’s work to date takes place at Tate Britain (7 July–24 October 2021). 

Inka Essenhigh

6 November–11 December 2021

Victoria Miro Venice

Living and working in New York, Inka Essenhigh makes paintings that are infused with a symbolist sensibility. The artist has described wanting to paint ‘what was unseen, to find the life within things and animate them.’ Essenhigh’s first exhibition at Victoria Miro Venice will present new paintings from her ongoing series of botanical works in enamel paint, a medium the artist first worked with two decades ago. The distinction between the real and the imagined is blurred; even when making a straightforward image of flowers that exist in the world, there is still the sense that Essenhigh has invented them. Exact and delicate in their execution, these works depict a peculiar vision of nature and ecology that are complete forms in themselves. Eliciting a strange and compelling beauty, these flowers, as critic Barry Schwabsky comments, ‘might be growing on another planet.’

Image: Paula Rego, La Marafona, 2005

Pastel on paper on aluminium

187 x 135 cm
73 5/8 x 53 1/8 in

© Paula Rego

Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro