Chiaroscuro : A Century of Charcoal , Victoria Miro Gallery

Chiaroscuro: A Century of Charcoal brings together works by over 30 artists made over the past 100 years. On view in a specially designed gallery on Vortic.art, with selected highlight works at Victoria Miro, London and Venice.


Nymphidia - Victoria Miro Gallery projects presented on Vortic

Victoria Miro Projects is delighted to launch Nymphidia, a presentation on Vortic by London-based artist Konstantina Krikzoni. This is the seventh project in an ongoing series of presentations by invited artists on Vortic.

Groups of female figures inhabit Krikzoni’s fluid and painterly underwater scenes, which blend ancient and contemporary approaches to storytelling that are shaped by her upbringing by the Aegean Sea. In her new body of work, Krikzoni disrupts narratives within historical and classical paintings and writings – from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ Le Bain Turc to the Greek mythological figures of sirens and harpies – to reconsider the relationship between women and nature.

Themes of creation and decay are central to Nymphidia. Submerged on a subaqueous stage, Krikzoni’s figures pose and gaze directly at the viewer from a shorefront surrounded by abstract flowers that bloom and wither around them. Krikzoni’s techniques incorporate staining, pouring, and glazing, as well as using freshly cut flowers as tools to paint. The artist describes them as ‘threatening rather than decorative, soaked in brine and emanating fumes — reworked symbols of femininity that aim to defy stereotypical portrayals.’

Broken Tulip, 2024, oil, watercolour, colour pencil, ink and flowers on linen

Source: https://programme.vortic.art/exhibitions/konstantina-krikzoni-nymphidia/

malta international biennale 2024 →

Curated by independent Italian curator Sofia Baldi Pighi and titled Insulaphilia, the Malta Biennale, the first event of its kind to be held on the tiny Mediterranean archipelago, will take place March 11–May 31, 2024. The newly restored Grandmaster’s Palace in the capital city of Valletta will serve as the main exhibition venue, with eleven other historic sites scattered across the islands of Malta and Gozo hosting exhibitions. Austria, China, France, Germany, Italy, Malta, Palestine, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Turkey, and Ukraine have all committed to pavilions.

72 artists will participate in the main exhibition of the Biennale, a number of them young and emerging, others internationally established. The show centers around issues related to the Mediterranean more broadly, Its concept refers to an obsession with islands and serves as a prompt for artists to reflect on Malta’s unique position at the crossroads of major surrounding regions and their histories. The main exhibition will be divided into four sections, each stemming from the themes laid out in Insulaphilia: regional issues, facets of decolonization, the political dimensions of the Mediterranean, and various forms of resistance.