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.