Victoria Miro Gallery: London Exhibitions, Autumn 2020

María Berrío: Flowered Songs and Broken Currents

The Colombian-born, New York-based artist is best known for her intricate, dream-like collages meticulously crafted from layers of Japanese paper. Her large-scale works, as the gallery explains, often reflect on ‘cross-cultural connections and global migration as seen through the prism of her own history’.

Berrío draws on her childhood memories in Colombia, mythology, and contemporary socio-political issues — particularly immigrant experiences and identities — facing America today. Her compositions often feature bold, vibrant colours and figures, usually women, who stare straight at the viewer.

‘We haven’t had a voice,’ Berrío told the Guardian in a recent interview. ‘People talk about Frida Kahlo – and I love Frida Kahlo – but it’s like, come on, there’s other Latina women. I feel like it’s my responsibility to shine the light on other Latina women who haven’t had this possibility.’

Her first solo show in the UK is set to do just that. In these works, she addresses the impact of trauma on the families and individuals living in an imaginary fishing village in Colombia, and explores both the pain of loss and the resilience of humanity. Even in the wake of trauma, she says, people continue to strive: ‘I hope these images give that message, that there’s hope and that, through art, you can see it.’

Grayson Perry: The MOST Specialest Relationship

Grayson Perry has had a pretty noteworthy year. In February, he became the first British visual artist since Henry Moore in 1968 to win the Erasmus Prize, a Dutch version of the Nobel awarded annually to an individual or an institution that has made ‘an exceptional contribution to the humanities, the social sciences or the arts.’ Shortly afterwards, as the world hurtled into quarantine, he launched his highly enjoyable Channel 4 Art Club to battle the ‘boredom of lockdown’ and encourage viewers to get creative at home. Guest artists included Antony Gormley, Jeremy Deller and Maggi Hambling, among others.

Now he’s set to inaugurate Victoria Miro London (when it reopens to the public this autumn) with an exhibition of new work inspired by his forthcoming documentary, Grayson Perry’s Big American Roadtrip. The three-part series explores some of the most divisive fault-lines in America today — including, identity, race, money and class — and seeks to understand what can be done to overcome them.

The works on display, which include ceramics, a tapestry and a large-scale print, respond to the programme’s themes and conversations. If previous Grayson Perry exhibitions are anything to go by, expect satirical jibes and poignant socio-political commentary aplenty.

Chantal Joffe

Chantal Joffe’s contemporary approach to portraiture has won her critical acclaim the world over. Executed in a fluid, smooth style, her unflinching portraits of women capture the ‘emotions, weakness and vitality of human existence’. Today her work can be found in such prestigious museum collections as the Royal Academy in London, The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and The Met in New York. They are also highly sought after by collectors of contemporary art at auction.

In this series of portraits — which includes a number of new paintings of the artist’s mother Darryll — Joffe tackles issues of aging, motherhood and invisibility, focusing particularly on the complex relationship between mother and child over time. The exhibition will also include a selection of large-scale pastel self-portraits.

For Joffe, the visceral nature of pastel adds a sense of intensity and immediacy to the portrait. ‘You can get a kind of brutality with pastel that you can’t with paint,’ she once said. ‘With paint there’s always an extension of your arm and brush. Whereas pastel is so primitive. You can’t draw hard enough.’