Victoria Miro is delighted to present Watchmen, an exhibition of new paintings by Emil Sands completed during a recent residency with the gallery in Venice. This is the gallery’s first solo presentation of Sands’ work since announcing representation of the artist.

Emil Sands, a London-born painter and writer currently living in New York, explores the complex psychological territory between seeing and being seen. His paintings are at once portraits and landscapes; mindful of the codes and orthodoxies of genres, he plays with their conventions while addressing themes of vulnerability and exposure drawn from personal experience.

Whereas recent works have focused on beach scenes or seascapes, new paintings retreat into private realms. These formal settings – manicured spaces including gardens populated by classical statuary – bring a heightened psychological aspect, poised between interiority and exteriority, privacy and self-presentation, physical enclosure and bodily disclosure. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a new essay by Christopher Riopelle, the Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London, who considers Sands within a lineage of artists and writers who respond and give shape to the city. Excerpts are featured below. 

  • ‘I like the title Watchmen… It allows different readings: the viewer, the people in the gallery are the Watchmen looking into these private worlds; the figures are often looking at one another and watching and acting; and then also these classical sculptures are sort of the final Watchmen, these final guards.’

    – Emil Sands

  • Emil Sands, Alan's Passion, 2025
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    Emil Sands, Alan's Passion, 2025

  • ‘My love for painting water is still there… I think the ability of the swimming pool to offer a different sort of reflection allows an interiority to come into the paintings.’

    – Emil Sands
  • Emil Sands, Alice, 2025
    Emil Sands, Alice, 2025
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    ‘Alice dips a tentative toe into a pool while on the far side two grand, possibly Baroque, busts on pedestals are reflected in the shimmering water.’

    – Christopher Riopelle

  • ‘I’m interested in these cultivated spaces. Even in The Vulture, where you have a very dramatic sky and high tree line, you see the corner of a house. I still wanted to say, no, we’re in a private space that’s been designed like this.’

    – Emil Sands

  • Emil Sands, The Vulture, 2025
    Emil Sands, The Vulture, 2025
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    ‘A lone male figure in baggy trunks looks up into a tumultuous sky… That we see the youth di sotto in su (from below, upwards – a strategy beloved of Venetian painters) suggests a perilous insecurity has rooted him to the spot.’

    – Christopher Riopelle

  • Emil Sands, Sentinel, 2025
    Emil Sands, Sentinel, 2025
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    ‘Greatly daring in his depiction of how people and things in nature interact, the mystery that is Venice here pushes Sands to new and greater subtleties and intricacies of observation.’

    – Christopher Riopelle

  • ‘The ancients used the body as a way to decipher and discover the world around them. And you can look at the body as a way to understand where we come from, who we are, what we want.’

    – Emil Sands
  • Emil Sands, All Day Duchess, 2025
    Emil Sands, All Day Duchess, 2025
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    ‘He continues to address a favourite theme: bathers absorbed in nature. He finds, however, a deepening visual and psychological complexity in the haunting solitude of individual figures…’

    – Christopher Riopelle

  • About the artist

    Emil Sands (born 1998 in London, currently living in New York) completed his Fine Art Foundation at Central Saint Martins,...
    Portrait of Emil Sands, Venice, 2025

    Emil Sands (born 1998 in London, currently living in New York) completed his Fine Art Foundation at Central Saint Martins, his BA and MPhil in Classics at the University of Cambridge, followed by the Henry Fellowship at Yale School of Art and Yale Creative Writing.

    Solo exhibitions include Kasmin Gallery, New York; JO-HS, Mexico City; and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Most recently his work has featured in the group exhibition The Stories We Tell: Tidawhitney Lek, Emil Sands, Khalif Tahir Thompson, held at Victoria Miro, London, November 2025–January 2026.

    Sands’ essay Struck on one Side, which focused on his experience growing up with cerebral palsy, was published in the March 2023 edition of The Atlantic magazine. He will publish his memoir I Am Not Achilles with Scribner (US) and Picador (UK) in 2027.

     

  • Related

  •  Sands in Venice 

    By Christopher Riopelle