Emil Sands: Watchmen

Victoria Miro presents Watchmen, an exhibition of new paintings by Emil Sands completed during a recent residency with the gallery in Venice. This is the gallery’s first solo presentation of Sands’ work since announcing representation of the artist.

Emil Sands, a London-born painter and writer currently living in New York, explores the complex psychological territory between seeing and being seen. His paintings are at once portraits and landscapes; mindful of the codes and orthodoxies of genres, he plays with their conventions while addressing themes of vulnerability and exposure drawn from personal experience.

Whereas recent works have focused on beach scenes or seascapes, new paintings retreat into private realms. These formal settings – manicured spaces including gardens populated by classical statuary – bring a heightened psychological aspect, poised between interiority and exteriority, privacy and self-presentation, physical enclosure and bodily disclosure.