John Kørner: Venice Lido Light
Victoria Miro is delighted to present an exhibition of new painting and sculpture by John Kørner. Commenced during a residency with the gallery in Venice, this new body of work is rich with association, taking the city as a metaphorical springboard into atmospheric realms of speculation and imagination. The exhibition is accompanied by a new essay by Max Andrews.
In erudite, questioning works John Kørner tackles subject matter with various degrees of abstraction and metaphor. These new paintings, initiated during a residency at the gallery’s Venice studio, reveal a fluidity of paint and thought as the artist considers aspects of place, his experience of and connection to a city saturated with images and its emotional and psychological undertow.
The paintings are rich with association – environmental, atmospheric, chromatic, gastronomic. Elements of Venice’s topography are discernible, its watery aspect evident throughout. Yet, driving forces of fluctuation, mutability and unpredictability serve to unsettle just as reference points are established and understood. Horizons stretch and warp, the ground shifts, rises and falls, defying logic or nature. Meanwhile, heightened, at times pointedly saccharine colours – hues of gelato or spritz – denote a sun-drenched, near-hallucinatory world.
These fugitive spaces are populated by a shifting cast of protagonists. Figures (beachgoers; a diver), fruit (apples; chromatically transient strawberries), footwear (a single adidas Spezial trainer) appear but are themselves caught as if in moments of transformation, rendered with dreamlike distortions of scale or colour, or recast, changing shape, direction or velocity from painting to painting.
While Kørner is celebrated as a colourist, white plays an especially active role, as in Diving Into the Unknown Venezia, in which a figure launches into the starkness of the unpainted world, or in Lido Lagoon, where areas of whitenessstraddle water and air, wrongfooting the viewer, or in Beach Matter, where a void reads as the body and legs of a beachgoer whose putative head bleeds into the colours of a setting sun. Throughout, Kørner alludes to optical or meteorological effects – from solar flare to Instagram filter – further inviting us to question the veracity of his mirage-like imagery.
In this context, the artist’s storied Problems assume multiple roles. A staple of his practice, Kørner’s Problems – oval or egg-like forms that appear in his paintings and as sculptures – allude not to specific problems per se but to the nature of questions and conundrums as they emerge and are comprehended in the world. They act as metaphors for the human condition and trigger questions about representation, knowledge, or belief – fundamental existential issues or those that allude to specific world events.
In these new paintings, the Problems exist singly – standing like candied megaliths or floating in space – or gather as spume, cloud or chorus. It is hard not to think of these thought bubbles as reflecting a certain anxiety, ecological or otherwise, specific to place. As Max Andrews comments in his accompanying essay, ‘A painter of problems that take shape in reality finds himself painting in a city literally sinking under the weight of intractable troubles.’
Problems also appear as sculptures, created in collaboration with the master glassmakers of Murano. Three problems in total is an especially characterful trio of Campari-coloured forms that seem to lean woozily on each other for support, while the amber forms of Three problems as one are nested like Matryoshka Dolls, one contained by another: ringing with beauty, cut through with unease.
About the artist
Born in Århus, Denmark in 1967, John Kørner lives and works in Copenhagen. His work was recently on view at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, Denmark, with the solo exhibition CRAZY AWAKE (2024). John Kørner: Intercontinental Super Fruits, the first solo museum exhibition of Kørner's work in the United States, was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, USA (2021–22).
Kørner’s work is held in institutional collections including Arken, Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; ARoS, Århus Museum of Art, Denmark; HEART – Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Hearning, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; National Gallery of Canada – Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Canada; National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark; Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA; Statens Museum for Kunst – SMK, Denmark; Tate, UK.
Image: John Kørner, Lido Lagoon, 2024–2025
Acrylic on canvas
150 x 120 cm
59 x 47 1/4 in
© John Kørner
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro
