GROUP SHOW WITH XIYAO WANG
MOTION IN STILLNESS: DANCE AND THE HUMAN BODY IN MOVEMENT

VICTORIA MIRO GALLERY, LONDON, UK
21 NOVEMBER 2024 – 18 JANUARY 2025

The challenge to preserve movement, even latent movement, in immobile form has preoccupied and beguiled artists over centuries. All of the artists presented in this exhibition have a relationship with dance or, more broadly speaking, with the human body in movement, and have created new works for this context.Dance is an art form in which the human body is material, and the desire to embed the physical body into the artwork itself is a hallmark of many of the works in this exhibition.

In the case of Xiyao Wang, charcoal lines and multicoloured oil stick marks suggest traces of energy left behind by the human body. Informed by her own training as a dancer and in martial arts, Wang’s paintings are abstract records of the way the body moves through space and time, and we scrutinise these strokes and lines to try and understand the pathways the body has created.

© Images Victoria Miro, London

FEATURED ARTIST

XIYAO WANG

Xiyao Wang (b. 1992 in Chongqing, China) is an artist born in China and educated there, and then subsequently in Germany. She received a BA from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2014, and a BA and MFA from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg (2018, 2020). Xiyao Wang is a painter whose sprawling language of abstract form is forged from a dialectic between the outer expressive gestures of her body as she paints, and the resulting marks generated on her canvases. The energy of both domains – the space before the painting and that of the depicted expanse within the frame of the picture – is captured with all of the vibrancy and vigour con...
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