DANH VO
White Cube is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Danh Vo, continuing the artist’s exploration of power structures and their influence on both personal and collective identity.
October 11 – November 16, 2024
In the ground-floor gallery, behind a provisional wall, a sculpture combining two fragments of ancient Roman marble is flanked by two paintings: Nancy Spero’s All Writing is Pigshit (1969), which features a quote from the French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, and a portrait of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco by Leon Golub (1976). Vo makes temporary spatial interventions to shape corridors of light and shadow in the gallery architecture, including pinewood construction scaffolding on the ground floor, which partially obstructs both physical and visual access.
In the niche of a barricaded stairwell, the artist has hung a bronze cast of a 16th-century Spanish figure of Christ crucified. Though the figure is missing its arms, casts of the hands of the artist’s father, Phung Vo, appear in their place. They hold glass tubes growing Tropaeolum majus, a red flowering plant whose name borrows from the ancient Greek word for ‘trophy’. Is Vo taking a Catholic father and using him to mutate a religious relic in the name of utility? While the artist sometimes teases this kind of cruelty, it is rarely more than a patina. Is this rather a way for Vo to remember the lines on his father’s palms? A way to remember his father?
Staging a meeting of craft across time, Vo’s floral canvases – originally painted by Northern European female artists between the late 19th and early 20th centuries – were procured through auction and inscribed on their verso by Phung Vo with the Latin names of the depicted flowers. The canvases later journeyed to Thailand where artisans applied gold gilding to the calligraphic lettering. An enduring motif in Vo’s work, flowers carry a rich symbolic lexicon, variously embodying beauty and love, sovereignty and resilience.
Many of these paintings took place in the context of related movements, such as Skønvirke in Denmark. In response to industrialisation, artists turned to an ornate beauty that could only be born from craft. As such, there was a strong emphasis on the dignity of labour. That the objects survive as contemporary art gives them an eerie politics: Vo’s layers build value and attraction, yet who exactly consented to this evolution? With Vo, such tensions between beauty, power and intimacy are key.