The Armory Show 2021

Victoria Miro is delighted to participate in The Armory Show (Booth 308) with a three-person presentation of new paintings by Hernan Bas, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and Doron Langberg.

With a focus on painting, the booth features new works by two artists, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and Doron Langberg, who are concurrently holding their first solo exhibitions with the gallery in London.

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 paintings combine visual fragments from a myriad of sources, such as online and archival images, and personal photographs, which collapse past and present. Powerful nudes are a point of departure and in her work the artist considers existence in a time and space – as much digital as physical – where people are investigating their sexual, spiritual and political identity.

An increasingly prominent voice among a new generation of figurative painters, New York-based artist Doron Langberg has gained a reputation for works that hinge on a sense of closeness. Langberg’s paintings, luminous in colour and often large in scale, celebrate the physicality of touch – in subject matter and process. His intimate yet expansive take on relationships, sexuality, nature, family and the self proposes how painting can both portray and create queer subjectivity. The broad scope of subjects and experiences on view in Langberg’s work is connected by his deeply felt use of paint. A slow unfolding of colour and gesture transforms figures and objects into materiality. These gaps between paint and the things it describes lend the work its distinct emotional and psychological register.

Hernan Bas is celebrated for works that, permeated by an aura of eroticism and decadence, and loaded with codes and double-meanings, point to the intricacies of self-identity, while celebrating moments of transformation – the ordinary becoming extraordinary. Bas’ work is intrinsically linked to an exploration of history and new paintings by the artist stem from his ongoing interest in figuring historical and mythological narratives within the imagery and iconography of popular culture, fashion, queer culture, mysticism and the occult. 

Viewing room of works by Milton Avery, Alice Neel and Paula Rego

Victoria Miro will present a special preview of works by Milton Avery, Alice Neel and Paula Rego ahead of the gallery’s three-person presentation of significant figurative paintings at Art Basel Switzerland later in the month.

Grayson Perry: Platform

Titled Can you hear the fault lines breathing?, the Platform section of the fair, curated Claudia Schmuckli, speaks to the urgency of working toward new models of bridging fault lines – societal, historical, or geographical – that are grounded in empathy and understanding. It features Grayson Perry’s large-scale tapestry Very Large Very Expensive Abstract Painting, 2020. Writing about the work on view Perry notes, ‘If I think of American cultural power, the image that pops into my head is a huge Abstract Expressionist painting, a Cold War symbol of a self-confident land of the free. This tapestry is made up of layers that reflect some of the cultural and social archaeology of Manhattan.’