Flora Yukhnovich: Thirst Trap
1–26 March 2022
Victoria Miro
New paintings draw upon various depictions of the Roman goddess Venus in mythology, art history and contemporary culture.
Rather than focus on individual points of reference, each work synthesises a multitude of influences that convey the shifting representations and significations of Venus herself. Here, the Venus that embodies idealised female form, is goddess of love, maternal care, sexual reproduction and erotic desire, meets the Venus of violent origin and hybrid gender – promiscuous and vengeful.
Celia Paul: Memory and Desire
6 April–7 May 2022
Victoria Miro
This exhibition of new paintings coincides with the publication of Letters to Gwen John, a new Jonathan Cape book by the artist which centres on a series of letters addressed to the painter Gwen John (1876–1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul.
Celia Paul’s art is founded on deep connections – familial, creative, threading back and forth across time – to people and places, and is self-assuredly quiet, contemplative and ultimately moving in its attention to detail and intensely felt spirituality. Through the epistolary form, Paul draws fruitful comparisons between John’s life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public’s reception of their work.
John Kørner: Cosmopolitan Super Fruits
8 April–7 May 2022
Victoria Miro
Following Intercontinental Super Fruits, John Kørner’s recent solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, this exhibition builds on themes of consumerism, globalisation and networks of distribution and exchange.
Cosmopolitan Super Fruits takes as a starting point the idea of the corner shop, a place of supply and consumption familiar to us all. Always treating content with various degrees of abstraction and metaphor, in this body of work Kørner brings into focus modes of display (fruit on the tree and vine, and picked, packaged and on the shelf) and the movement of foodstuffs as they collide with aspects of contemporary politics and ecological thought in the context of ever-evolving concepts of the local, regional, national and global.
Paula Rego: Secrets of Faith
23 April–21 May 2022
Victoria Miro Venice
Completed in 2002, the works on view depict episodes from the life of the Virgin Mary – subjects familiar in Christian art radically retold by Rego that are among the most special to the artist.
During his presidency of Portugal, Jorge Sampaio (1939–2021) invited the artist to create a series for the chapel of the Palácio de Belém, in Lisbon. In response, Rego made Nossa Senhora, tackling Mary’s story with a curiosity and passion that resulted far in excess of the eight works which were eventually installed in the chapel. This exhibition features additional works from the cycle and a number of related watercolours that reveal Rego’s thought processes as she depicts Mary viewed from the lived experience of women – embracing the Virgin’s iconography while unseating serene and ethereal depictions from art history, finding the most pertinent parts of the story and dramatising them in ways that speak beyond the traditional narrative.
Image: Paula Rego, Agony in the Garden, 2002
Pastel on paper on aluminium
76 x 70 cm
29 7/8 x 27 1/2 in
© Paula Rego
courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro