XAVIER VEILHAN: COMPASS

Perrotin New York is pleased to present Compass, a solo project by French artist Xavier Veilhan.

February 28 – April 12, 2025

The works on view focus on the artist’s interest in geometry, including a new series of line drawings, graphic mobiles, small wooden sculptures and a marquetry, as well as a site-specific mural of hand drawn circles on the walls of the gallery.

Over the last three decades, Xavier Veilhan has developed a multiform approach to sculpture, painting, performance, video, and photography, often generating installations in which the audience becomes an active participant. Known primarily for his figurative sculptures and conceptual paintings, he has developed his own formal vocabulary, reinterpreting classical sculptural and architectural elements under a technological gaze. Utilizing geometrical figures and mathematical designs, the artist conceptualizes the living world through an analytical perspective.

In the exhibition, we are welcomed by the form of Alice n°2, the only marquetry on view. Combining the digital and the material, Veilhan attempts to capture the familiar likeness of the human figure through a modernistic perspective. The structural geometric form poised against a neutral background questions our understanding of classical portraiture, as Alice exists separate from physical representation of the real world.

Multiple repeated circles frame each twodimensional line drawing, extending his works on paper into the threedimensional space of the gallery. Veilhan’s Compass becomes not only a literal tool for drawing circles, but a metaphor for finding one's bearings in space.