VARDA CAIVANO'S NEW PAINTINGS AT VICTORIA MIRO IN LONDON

Craig Garrett


Catherine Lampert


crowd at the opening

Press Release:

Victoria Miro is delighted to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Varda Caivano, her second solo show with the gallery. Evocative, elusive, and exuding a quiet confidence, Caivano's paintings present a series of explorations of the medium and the language of abstraction. In her practice, abstraction undergoes a rigorous examination, reinforcing this painterly territory as fluid, undetermined, and open for constant re-evaluation.

Caivano's works are the result of an extensive decision-making process, each brushstroke and colour conceived in relation to the one that came before within the particular space of the canvas. Yet arrived at is not simply an object - a painting - but an encounter: with memory, desire, emotion; something within grasp yet just out of reach. Conveying a sense of the improvised, each canvas contains it's own painterly journey - the collection of marks in unision reveal the whole as greater than the sum of its parts.

The artist's subtle play between surface and depth, material and image, colour and texture registers a tension between the familiar and the unknown, akin to an experience of language forgotten and almost remembered, or a melody lodged deep in the unconscious. Suggestive of liminal spaces, each work bears a decentralised composition held together by its own resonant energy: paint is pushed and pulled across the canvas, built up and withdrawn, lapses and drifts and, suddenly, announces its place. Importantly, time is key to the making and viewing of Caivano's works, as the structure of her paintings is seemingly always in transition, something that unfolds and is still unfolding.

Varda Caivano was born in 1971 in Buenos Aires, Argentina and graduated from Royal College of Art in 2004 with an MA in Painting. Her paintings are included in the British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet, which will be on view in London at the Hayward Gallery from 16 February. Other recent exhibitions include Collection 2 - Focus on Recent Acquisitions, National Gallery of Osaka, Japan (2010); Resonance, Suntory Museum, Osaka, Japan (2010); East End Academy: The Painting Edition, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2009); M25 Around London, CCA Andratx Art Centre, Majorca, Spain (2008); Busan Biennale, South Korea (2008); Very Abstract and Hyper Figurative, curated by Jens Hoffmann, at Thomas Dane Gallery (2007); and solo exhibitions at Chisenhale Gallery, London (2007) and Kunsterverein Freiburg (2006). Varda Caivano is a recent recipient of the prestigious Abbey Award, British School at Rome and she will take up the fellowship during 2011.

http://www.victoria-miro.com