Victoria Miro is delighted to present an exhibition of new painting and sculpture by John Kørner.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new essay by Max Andrews.

  • John Kørner, Lido Lagoon, 2024-2025
    John Kørner, Lido Lagoon, 2024–2025
     
    Enquire

    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. These new paintings 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.

    Hues of gelato or spritz denote a sun-drenched, near-hallucinatory world.

    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.
  • John Kørner, Magical Opal Sea, 2025
    John Kørner, Magical Opal Sea, 2025
    Enquire

    ‘If that’s the magic opal Adriatic on the right, we must be looking north, towards Sant’Erasmo. Another strawberry is asserting its political intention. The lightweight and low-cut trainer (originally designed for elite handball players) has circled around over the city and is now flying out into the gulf towards a sfogliatella cosmic object.’ 

    – Max Andrews

  • John Kørner, Lido, 2024-2025
    John Kørner, Lido, 2024-2025
    Enquire

    ‘Two human beings greet each other atop a sculpture of one of the reef-like concretions known as tegnùe which marine biologists have mapped off the Veneto coast. “Held back” in Venetian dialect. A fishermen’s coinage, as nets were routinely snagged on these hidden masses.’

    – Max Andrews

  • John Kørner, Sky Opens, 2025
    John Kørner, Sky Opens, 2025
    Enquire

    ‘The fingers of the waves reach for the strip of beach, nails foaming as they drag back.’

    – Max Andrews

  • 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.

  • John Kørner, Diving Into the Unknown Venezia, 2024-2025
    John Kørner, Diving Into the Unknown Venezia, 2024–2025
    Enquire

    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.

  • 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.

  • John Kørner, Beach Matter, 2025
    John Kørner, Beach Matter, 2025
    Enquire

    ‘On the beach, his mental clouds are precipitating doubt about how to picture a place that is already so saturated.’ 

    – Max Andrews

  • 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. 

    ‘A painter of problems that take shape in reality finds himself painting in a city literally sinking under the weight of intractable troubles.’

    – Max Andrews


    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.’
    • John Kørner, Three problems as one, 2024
      John Kørner, Three problems as one, 2024
      Enquire
    • John Kørner, Three problems in total, 2024
      John Kørner, Three problems in total, 2024
      Enquire

  • 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.

  • John Kørner, Venezia, 2024-2025
    John Kørner, Venezia, 2024–2025
    Enquire

    ‘The sky splits, smoke and sugar fill the sinuses. Choreographed peonies and chrysanthemums, willows and palms arrive in sequenced delay – each a particulate combustion above Giudecca.’

    – Max Andrews

  • About the artist

    Born in Århus, Denmark in 1967, John Kørner lives and works in Copenhagen. His work was recently on view at...
    Portrait photography: Søren Rønholdt
    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 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.

  • Related

  • Explore our autumn exhibitions

  • LIVE / ARCHIVE

    An immersive journey through our programmatic strands
    Experience our galleries from wherever you are in the world