Victoria Miro presents an exhibition marking the centenary of the birth of one of Scotland’s greatest artists, Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006). Fragments is both a major new book and eight exhibitions that will take place internationally during May 2025 in Basel, Brescia, Edinburgh, Hamburg, London, New York, Palma de Mallorca and Vienna, curated and edited by Pia Maria Simig.
An artist, poet and landscape designer, Ian Hamilton Finlay reinvigorated the classical tradition in a body of work that encompasses a variety of creative forms to celebrate the sustaining power of words. He is best known for his garden Little Sparta, set in the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, where he lived and worked for the last 40 years of his life. He significantly influenced the concrete poetry movement, and his extensive printed poetical and graphical works were published by Wild Hawthorn Press, which he co-founded in 1961. His visual art work, achieved in collaboration with expert artists and craftspeople, can be found in museums, parks and gardens worldwide.
Drawn principally from the 1990s, and featuring sculpture in stone, wood and neon, as well as wall painting, tapestry and print, works on view at Victoria Miro in London are curated around the themes of ‘maritime’ and ‘revolution’. Representing a moment of enormous political and aesthetic rupture and signalling a great moral, as well as political leap, the French Revolution proved a rich subject for Finlay; he first received international attention for his guillotine installation A View to the Temple at Documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987 and thereafter the guillotine became one of the most enduring elements of his iconography.
| Duration | 30 April 2025 - 24 May 2025 |
| Times | Tuesday–Saturday: 10am–6pm. |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Victoria Miro London |
| Address | 16 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW |
| Contact | 4402073368109 / info@victoria-miro.com / www.victoria-miro.com |